Dear CFO: Why the CIO Will Be Asking for More Device Budget Next Year

We already know that many global organisations have extended the life of end-user devices especially laptops more than usual. For many, deferring refreshes has become a necessity: budgets are tight with economic pressures everywhere. Users are often happy to keep their device and avoid disruption of refresh. Extending device lifecycles makes sense as a cost-control measure. But there’s a limit. Stretching too far risks negative impacts on technology, people, and ultimately business performance. 

Many organisations globally are doing precisely that: pushing device lifecycles to the maximum, often having refreshed only the bare minimum through 2025. As the dynamics of operating systems, security, AI workloads, and user expectations evolve, the cost of deferred investment is rising fast. 

Below, I want to lay out why the CIO (and Digital Workplace / Workspace teams) will be knocking on your door next year, asking for increased investment in devices not just to replace old ones, but to prepare for far more demanding workloads. Then I’ll show how Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools can help us avoid the cliff, balancing cost discipline with performance, using intelligent insights and data rather than guess work.

The Problem: When Extended Device Lifecycles Begin to Cost Us

1. Failure, downtime, maintenance overheads increase
   Old devices simply break more. Batteries swell, displays dim, ports fail, firmware/driver issues pile up. More helpdesk tickets, more repair cycles, more time lost. Even seemingly small performance lags add up when multiplied across hundreds or thousands of users.

2. Security risk increases
   Newer generations of devices have better hardware root of trust, better embedded security (for example TPMs, secure enclaves, firmware protections, and so on). Aging devices will fall out of warranty, and vendors stop issuing patches for older hardware. That means vulnerabilities that can’t be fixed—or fix delays that leave us exposed.

3. Support & warranty gaps
   Out-of-warranty means higher repair costs, longer lead-times for parts, potentially loss of business continuity if critical applications depend on devices that fail. This also means unpredictable cost spikes when issues arise—replacing components, dealing with failures.

4. Workload demands are rising fast
   Applications are getting heavier (data, graphics, processing). More people are working from a hybrid workspace or need high mobility. On top of that, we’re entering a phase where AI workloads (even modest ones: on-device ML inference, AI-assisted tasks, edge AI) are becoming standard in corporate laptops. Vendors are already bringing to market “AI PCs” with special processors, hardware accelerators, more powerful GPUs/NPUs. Old hardware struggles here.

5. Windows 10 end-of-support (or similar OS lifecycle deadlines)
   For many organisations the OS lifecycle forces a refresh wave. For example, Windows 10 support ends in late 2025, prompting many businesses to refresh to devices that can reliably run the newer OS and meet its security/performance prerequisites.

Not everyone has been able to act in time, usually due to resource constraints or lack of insights to plan an effective migration

1. Global market dynamics: AI PCs and shipments
   Some statistics already point toward what the supply side and analysts expect:

   • A recent Gartner report forecasts that by end of 2025, AI-capable PCs (in both enterprise and consumer sectors) will account for ~31% of the global PC market, with shipments of ~77 million units.

These point to a refresh cycle being triggered—not just because old hardware fails, but because new hardware is demanded by changing workloads and OS/security/AI support.

1. Hidden costs & business performance risk
   When devices under-perform, employees feel it. Systems that lag reduce productivity. Users get frustrated. There’s loss of opportunity: slow response times, delays, inability to run required tools efficiently. And, the cost of doing nothing or doing minimal is not zero: it can eat into margins when inefficiency accumulates, security incidents occur, or IT spends more time firefighting.

So, while stretching device lifecycles has been a rational cost-control strategy during a lean economy, the danger is that many organisations have stretched too far. It’s creating a situation where a device-related problem or cumulative performance degradation could tip operations into serious inefficiency or risk.

Evidence That Organisations Are Doing the Bare Minimum

While specific device refresh data is often private, there are signals in public analyst reports:

• The PC/Laptop market is forecast to grow in value, driven by enterprise demand. But many reports note that growth isn’t being driven by consumer upgrades consumers are deferring.

• The surge in shipments in 2025 is tied strongly to OS deadline (e.g. Windows 10), indicating many organisations delayed refresh until becoming forced to upgrade and many still haven’t.

• There’s also growing interest in refurbished laptops and extended life markets, showing demand for cheaper, extended usage. While not always ideal for all use cases, it’s a signal people are trying to stretch existing hardware.

• Analyst forecasts for laptop market growth indicate that demand is expected to remain strong, especially in business segments, as organisations catch up with delayed refreshes and invest in higher-end, AI-ready devices.

So yes: many are doing only the bare minimum in 2025, either deferring refreshes or replacing only what absolutely breaks / falls out of support.

What This Means: Why the CIO Will Need More Budget

Putting all this together, from the CIO’s perspective:

• We need to refresh more devices than we might have planned, sooner than the old schedule, to maintain performance, reliability, security.

• We need devices that support AI-enabled workloads, both for efficiency (on-device AI assist, ML) and security (hardware-accelerated encryption, etc.).

• We need to reduce downtime and hidden costs (helpdesk, lost productivity, repair overheads).

• We need to ensure user satisfaction and engagement because technology frustrations cost more than just employee annoyance (turnover, disengagement, lower output).

All of this means that even though we want to be frugal, the cost of not investing becomes larger over time.

The Role of Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Here’s where DEX (Digital Employee / Workplace Experience) tools come in. They offer a way to manage this tension: economic efficiency vs business performance risk. Using DEX, the IT/CIO function can be far more surgical, data-driven, with less guesswork, so that investments are targeted where most needed.

What DEX brings:

• Visibility & observability: See how devices, applications, networks are actually performing. Metrics like boot times, app launch times, resource saturation, error rates, firmware/driver issues, crash/freeze stats, network latency, etc.

• User sentiment / satisfaction: Measuring end-user perception: are people complaining? Are some teams or regions repeatedly raising tickets or reporting lag? DEX tools often include direct or proxy measures of user experience.

• Trend detection across applications, departments, geographies: Is performance slowly degrading in certain user cohorts (sales, remote workers, finance or production processors)? Are certain hardware models particularly problematic? Is there a pattern of failure in a device class?

• Risk identification: Knowing which devices are out of warranty, which have known vulnerabilities, which have performance profiles below acceptable thresholds. Being alerted before full breakdown.
  
  

How this helps balance cost vs performance:

• The ability to defer refresh for devices that are still performing well, with evidence. No need to replace en masse just because they are past a “standard age” if performance is acceptable, satisfaction is high, risk is low.

• Ability to prioritise refresh where it really matters: high-impact users, mission-critical roles, regions where performance or failures are high, or where security risk is elevated.

• Plan refresh cycles intelligently: perhaps rolling, phased, or targeted, combining cost savings, remanufactured or refurbished where acceptable, for non-critical users; full-spec new devices where needed.

• Preparing for upcoming demands (AI, OS changes) by identifying which hardware falls short in advance, so procurement can be scheduled, budgeted, transitioned smoothly.
  
  

Why this is good for the CFO as well:

• Reduces wasted spend on blanket refreshes where not needed.

• Reduces operational/repair/maintenance costs and risk of unplanned outages or security incidents which can be very costly.

• Improves productivity, which helps revenue (or margin) side of the ledger.

• Improves employee satisfaction and reduces the hidden costs of downtime, churn, low morale.

Putting It All Together: A Path Forward

So, what should be the approach (from CIO / IT to CFO) to make the best investment decisions next year, mitigating risk and maximising value?

1. Baseline & audit: Use DEX tooling now to map out current state, device ages, performance, failure rates, warranty status, security posture, user satisfaction.

2. Segmentation of risk and impact: Identify where poor device performance is harming business outcomes e.g. sales, customer support, field operations, R&D. Also map which device models are “close to the cliff edge” (planning to be repurposed, failing), which are safe to extend.

3. Scenario planning: Build scenarios for refresh investment vs continued extension costs. For example: the cost of maintaining old devices (repairs, helpdesk, failures) vs cost of investing now in new devices. Include risk of breaches, extended downtime.

4. Phased refresh: Rather than “all or nothing,” prioritise high risk / high impact, then roll out in phases. In each phase, monitor via DEX to see whether performance improves as expected.

5. Future-proofing: For the parts of the fleet that will be replaced, ensure the new devices are equipped with latest standards security, AI-capable where necessary, hardware acceleration, enough resources (RAM/CPU/SSD) to support workloads over next 3-5 years.

6. Continuous observability: Not just once; track device performance, user sentiment continuously. Use the data to feed into next year’s budgeting, to more finely tune which refreshes are essential, which can be delayed.

Conclusion: Why the Ask Makes Sense and Why It Can Be Confident

CFOs are under immense pressure to control costs, hardware, software, operational overheads all must be aligned with financial discipline. Deferred refresh is one lever used globally to reduce spend. But there’s a tipping point: defer too long and the business starts to suffer from lost productivity, increased support and repair costs, security exposures, and employee dissatisfaction.

Digital Employee Experience tooling gives CIOs and IT leaders the data needed to avoid that cliff-edge. With DEX, you can see what is happening in the field, quantify performance, diagnose risk, and prioritise spend where it makes most impact. That means savings can still be driven by deferring unnecessary replacements, by extending asset life where it’s safe, by choosing refurbished or lower-cost options where acceptable but without exposing the business to serious downside.

So, when the CIO comes knocking in 2026 asking for more funds to refresh ageing devices and prepare for more demanding workloads, know this: it’s not because they want to spend more it’s because, without that investment, the business (and its people) will start paying a much steeper price.