Summary
Investment management firms that master technology roadmap alignment must balance innovation, stakeholder buy-in, governance, and execution capacity to ensure technology investments deliver measurable business outcomes.
Financial services technology executives, including those at investment management firms, are shifting away from legacy infrastructure. According to KPMG, 74% plan to prioritize investment in new technology over maintaining legacy systems during the next 12 months.i
Although the money is moving, the harder task is getting the people to move with it. Your staff is already asking when the cloud and AI efficiency gains are coming. But technology roadmaps lead organizations astray when key people aren’t aligned behind them and instead try to move quickly on their own.
The single most important factor in executing a firm’s growth strategy is involving internal stakeholders in developing it, not presenting it to them once it’s done.ii While it’s no secret that buy-in is a critical factor, not everyone agrees on whose buy-in is necessary, nor in which direction buy-in should flow. Whether data scientists bring innovations to department heads or business leaders bring their needs to tech teams, no stakeholder should be left out of the process.
Sometimes business teams can resist new technology before they understand it. Initiatives often fail when they are run exclusively by a technology group without involving the business from day one.
If you give the green light after weeks of discussions but then thrust the solution onto an unsuspecting business unit, the implementation stalls, and months of evaluation time become sunk costs. These conversations should be front-loaded. Business users who feel technology is being forced on them without their input will resist it; research confirms that trust and emotional buy-in are what separate successful transformations from stalled ones.iii For AI initiatives in particular, the entire C-suite needs to be in the room before any vendor conversation starts.
Open communication between IT, the C-suite, and business units is about more than just sparing people’s feelings. If you bring business unit leaders in late, they’ll spot weaknesses in the solution that only a domain expert would catch. The solution ends up too narrow in scope, treating the symptom rather than the underlying disease.
“57% of [C-suite executives in 20 sectors] survey respondents pointed to the lack of dual leadership from both the business and technology sides, which undermines project sponsorship and team-level collaboration. Teams are often plagued by missing business experts who can define, validate, and prioritize business requirements. Tech involvement (both time and focus) suffers from experts being committed to too many other high-priority tech programs.” — 2024 Boston Consulting Group Global Build for the Future studyiv
Two-thirds of surveyed C-suite executives said there was tension between IT teams and other lines of business in AI adoption, and 71% said that AI applications were being created in a silo within their organization.v The silos are a big part of that tension.
When a reconciliation manager reaches out to IT to build an AI tool to reduce breaks by 15% or 20%, the instinct is to move fast. The problem the CTO needs to see is what’s underneath it. When it comes to rolling out AI agents, the reconciliation workflow rarely exists in isolation. Addressing an overarching data infrastructure problem can solve numerous organizational workflow issues.
When it comes to AI transformations, the governance model that works combines decentralized experimentation with oversight from a central unit like a steering committee.
While 100% organizational buy-in is unnecessary, you have to build outward: a few business champions who own the success story and keep fellow executives aligned throughout, not just at the start.
If you’re facing resistance or inertia in obtaining IT roadmap buy-in for software or agentic AI initiatives, it may be time to caution colleagues against the cost of inaction, revisit implementation tactics, or find a technology provider that treats organizational change as part of the implementation. In an environment where technology cycles don’t slow down, firms that master change management capture the tech-driven efficiencies and resilience that come with it. The ones that don’t are still debating the roadmap.
Alex Dobson
Alex Dobson currently holds the position of Senior Vice President at Arcesium, where he is responsible for overseeing the product team in the US. Before taking on this role, Alex served as SVP and services relationship manager in the Financial Operations group, where he successfully managed multiple large client engagements.
Sources:
i KPMG, 2025. https://kpmg.com/kpmg-us/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2025/kpmg-tech-survey-financial-services-insights.pdf
ii Harvard Business Review, February 29, 2024. https://hbr.org/2024/02/internal-buy-in-will-make-or-break-your-growth-strategy
iii Samson Oludapo, Noel Carroll, Markus Helfert, A Lero, J.E., January 5, 2024. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296324000328#s0115
iv BCG, November 13, 2024. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/most-large-scale-tech-programs-fail-how-to-succeed
v WRITER/Workplace Intelligence, March 18, 2025. https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-survey-press-release/
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