{"id":14947,"date":"2026-02-11T09:46:35","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T09:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/?p=14947"},"modified":"2026-02-11T09:46:36","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T09:46:36","slug":"revolut-business-study-romanian-companies-prioritise-investment-in-basic-it-over-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/?p=14947","title":{"rendered":"Revolut Business study: Romanian companies prioritise investment in basic IT over AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>While the world is captivated by artificial intelligence, new research by Revolut Business among 150 Romanian business decision-makers (CEOs, CFOs and COOs) reveals that AI is not yet a top priority in the budgets of Romanian companies this year. They prefer to invest their money in modernising their IT infrastructure and automating outdated systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When asked where the largest budget increase will go this year, \u2018modernising IT infrastructure and cloud migration\u2019 takes the top spot (19%). This is followed by scaling up sales and marketing for market share (16%) and hiring new talent to expand the team (12%). Strikingly, \u2018building out AI capabilities\u2019 comes in sixth place with only 10%. Thus, Romanian companies seem to want to repair the past first, before looking ahead and jumping fully onto the AI bandwagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If companies do want to get started with AI, the technology itself is rarely the problem. Only 15% of surveyed executives view IT infrastructure as the biggest obstacle to AI adoption. The real hurdles are human: leadership buy?in and clear business integration strategy (31%) and change management programmes for employees (21%). Furthermore, a quarter of corporates struggle primarily with internal buy-in, while one in five medium-sized companies simply lacks the technical talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That the foundation is not yet solid is also evident from the biggest frustrations. When asked which process is the most dated and needs immediate replacement, one quarter of respondents (24%) cite \u2018manual data entry and reporting\u2019. Long?winded HR onboarding processes (22%) are also a thorn in the side, especially for small-sized companies (32%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although the general trend points towards consolidation, the research exposes an interesting discrepancy between the different board members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>The CEOs want to retain: The CEOs prefer to put money into certainty. For them, \u2018talent retention\u2019 is a much higher priority (15%) than for the CFO (5%).<\/li><li>The CFOs want to innovate: CFOs are more favorable to innovation than the CEOs (23% vs 13%)<\/li><li>This exposes a strategic dilemma: the CFO chases expansion and innovation, while the CEO prioritises internal stability and retention in an overheated labour market.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Iulian Boia, Sales Manager at Revolut Business, recognises the struggle of Romanian entrepreneurs:\u00a0<\/strong><em>\u201cRomanian companies are rightly pragmatic: you don\u2019t build a skyscraper on a weak foundation. But modernising doesn\u2019t have to mean spending years on IT projects. Many of the \u2018old school\u2019 frustrations highlighted in the research \u2013 such as time-consuming administration and unnecessarily complex approvals \u2013 can be solved immediately with the current generation of smart financial tools. By connecting solutions that automate this \u2018manual work,\u2019 you bridge the gap between the desires of the CEO and the CFO\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While the world is captivated by artificial intelligence, new research by Revolut Business among 150 Romanian business decision-makers (CEOs, CFOs and COOs) reveals that AI is not yet a top priority in the budgets of Romanian companies this year. They [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,19,18,12,6,3,5,317],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14950,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14947\/revisions\/14950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsourcing-today.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}