Business Spend Index: Inside the AI Build-Out, Services Spend Overtook Software

The 2026 Q3 Coupa Business Spend Index™ (BSI) reports that High Technology spend rose 6.5% in the first half of 2026 and set new highs in five of six months. IT services climbed from 8.8% to 14% of sector spend, the largest share gain of any category we track, while software's share fell from 12.5% to 8.5% even as software dollars kept growing.

The shift beneath High Technology’s growth

High Technology has been the loudest spending story of the past year. The sector's committed spend rose 6.5% between December 2025 and June 2026, according to Coupa's Q3 2026 Business Spend Index (BSI), setting new highs in five of six months, straight through a 13.2% Nasdaq correction that ran from late October to a March trough. Companies treated AI investment as a repositioning they had to make. A falling market did not change that.

A single sector line cannot tell you what they bought. The Coupa BSI can. Every purchase order and invoice on Coupa's platform already carries a commodity classification. IT services, software, hardware, freight, facility management, and dozens more.

This is not software collapsing

A smaller share does not mean high tech companies bought less software. The value of software commitments rose 36% July through December 2023 and December 2025 through May 2026. Software lost share because IT services grew faster and took a larger place in the sector’s spending mix.

That shift points to a change in what high tech companies are buying as their overall commitments rise. The category data alone cannot tell us how much of that change is tied to AI.

Buying AI as labor, not licenses

A license does not configure itself, connect to three systems of record, survive a security review, or persuade a skeptical finance team to change how it closes the month. People do that work, driving the industry’s sharp increase in IT services spend.

AI adoption offers one possible source of that demand. In McKinsey's 2025 State of AI survey, 88% of respondents said their organizations regularly used AI in at least one business function, while roughly one-third said their companies had begun scaling their AI programs.

That gap between using AI and scaling it is a services purchase, and we can see it in our own category data.

Where the deceleration went

High Technology's growth did slow, and sharply. The second half of 2025 grew 4.9% compared to the first half of 2026 growth of 1.4%. Reading that deceleration, our Q2 outlook expected the sector to flatten at an elevated base.

It kept climbing instead. High Technology printed new highs through June, at a slower pace.

The category view explains the distance between those two things. Growth decelerated in aggregate while the mix underneath it reorganized, and a sector relocating this much spend between categories is not a sector settling into a plateau. The slowdown was real. It changed where the money went.

In our 2026 annual BSI report, published earlier this year, we described High Technology's growth as targeted at AI infrastructure and Software as a Service, with the spending reflecting a push toward operational efficiency. That analysis holds. Software dollars have kept rising since. What changed between that edition and this one is the rate, and services is now taking share faster than software can hold it.

Outside forecasts have started landing in the same place. Gartner's September AI spending update puts AI services at $576.5 billion for 2026 against AI software at $461.6 billion, with its analysts pointing to enterprises hiring service providers to get more out of software they already own. Our data is the same shift seen from the buyer's side of the invoice, and seen earlier, because a purchase order is committed before it becomes anyone's revenue.

What we're watching

Coupa named High Technology the sector most at risk in this edition. Its firms have committed at record levels to AI, and the return on that spending is still unproven. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027, and the Bank for International Settlements named the AI investment boom a financial-stability risk in its 2026 annual report. The High Technology index set new highs straight through a 13.2% Nasdaq correction, so none of that doubt has reached commitments. If returns disappoint, this is where the line likely would bend. Commitments reprice on renewal calendars, and we will report what the 2026 Q4 BSI shows.

The signal underneath it is discretionary spend. Contracted commitments are slow to move, since exiting a multiyear agreement costs more than continuing it. Discretionary spend is the fast channel, and it is where a change in appetite appears first.

So the specific question for the next two quarters is whether the services share keeps climbing once the straightforward deployment work is finished, or flattens as companies build the capability in-house and stop paying someone else for it.

Renewal season is running through the back half of this year, which is when contracted software commitments actually reprice. Every number here gets retested against Q3 data in our next edition, and that is where the answer shows up first.

About the Business Spend Index

The Coupa Business Spend Index is built from purchase orders, signed contracts, and renewals committed by thousands of businesses using Coupa's platform, captured the moment each commitment is made. It tracks five U.S. sectors: High Technology, Manufacturing, Business Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Financial Services. Findings are aggregated and reported at sector level. No individual company, supplier, or transaction is identified.

About Coupa Spend Lab

Coupa Spend Lab is the research and intelligence arm of Coupa, focused on generating strategic insight from aggregate patterns across one of the world’s largest repositories of business spend
data. The lab applies data science, predictive modeling, and AI to transform anonymized, community-level procurement signals into decision-grade intelligence. The lab produces benchmarks, indices, and analytical frameworks that help organizations understand and optimize how they spend.