Company culture has always been important in tech. It’s how companies foster an environment for innovation, and it’s how they recruit and inspire the best talent. Without a culture aligned to the future, tech companies fall behind.
“Tech is heavily focused on innovation, creativity and a fast-paced environment — and a lot of the work is now hybrid or virtual,” said Grant Thornton Growth Advisory Senior Manager Jesse Leder. “That can create a cultural issue, or a gap.” In fact, our Technology Industry CFO survey showed that cultural issues can be at the core of some challenges facing tech companies.
“Really, the top five items all play together,” Leder said. “Culture is a top priority — tech is fast-paced, and people can burn out. To counteract that, and to attract and retain key talent, companies move to hybrid workforces — but you need to ensure technology is in place for virtual collaboration and innovation. It’s a cycle of impacts, and you need to manage them all.”
To find the right balance, consider how culture is a critical thread that runs through the business issues of workforce, cybersecurity and AI.
Workforce: Choose your adventure
Organizational culture surged to the top human capital priority in this year’s results, with 58% of responses compared to 45% in last year’s survey.
“In the tech industry, the mentality of growth at all costs has subsided,” said Grant Thornton Technology Industry National Leader Andrea Schulz. Companies can’t rely on money alone to retain their best talent. “That's not what your investors are expecting … That’s why culture is probably being dialed up now, because it’s a refresh."
To meet the current expectations of investors and employees, companies need a more nuanced strategy with a balance of pay, a positive environment and opportunities for advancement.
“Companies need to look at what they can actually dial up to bring back that culture that tech firms were notable for,” Schulz said.
Core culture
“Companies have to increase their stickiness, because they don't want to go through the cost of losing talent and having to find the right people in the market right now,” Schulz said. “They need to consider what they can use as a differentiation point, without using money as the primary incentive.”
Grant Thornton Cyber Risk Advisory Services Managing Director Don Sheehan agreed, “You've seen tech companies rely upon high compensation, but also working their people very hard. It's been that kind of industry, and that has worked before, but it’s maybe not working as well anymore.” Sheehan said that today’s remote-work cultures need to consider work/life balance and other factors beyond the in-office perks of the past. “What we see is the ancillary benefits from being a part of this company, whether it's a flexible work schedule or that the company has taken on a more pronounced stance on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”
“It comes back to the question: ‘What are the identity, shared values and common language that we can tie to our culture? Then, how can we activate that through things like our DE&I programs and the benefits we offer?’” Sheehan said. While a company’s core culture is a starting point, the next step is the path to advancement.
Career path differentiation
The best tech talent wants to keep moving up. If you can’t offer a path to advancement, the best talent might never join your company at all.
Leder said that the top tech companies show new recruits exactly how their potential role can evolve in two, three, four years and beyond. “All of that should be laid out in front of candidates, so they can visualize themselves being there for more than just the short term. They see what their careers can look like 10 years down the road — that's how the top companies build some of their retention.”
“Candidates want to see that advancement, so really the company’s goal is to document it, making sure that it outlines paths and job structures,” Leder said. “A lot of companies fail to have that well-documented. They’ll tell candidates loosely how they can progress, but people are looking for the skills, timeline and details about how the company is going to invest in them. It can't just be ‘Engineer one,’ ‘Engineer two,’ ‘Engineer three,’ they need to know what comes after that.”
Tech companies often struggle to create long-term career paths that motivate workers while aligning with their skills. For example, a developer who doesn’t appear to possess managerial skills might still want a path to advancement. “The tech industry has a reputation for saying people are just good at one specific thing,” Leder said. “But, if you’re good at X widget, you only can be good at X widget for so long — how do you then get the managerial skills to move to the next level?” Many companies need to incorporate managerial training and development into their career paths, to avoid putting people on paths to roles that might not fit.
Another approach is to look at how employees can provide valuable expertise in other areas. “We've seen rotational programs provide a good mechanism for development opportunities, where employees get exposure to other skills or competencies, but also leadership opportunities,” said Grant Thornton Growth Advisory Senior Manager Alon Avdi.
Companies might even need to break out of the typical managerial pay hierarchy altogether. “One thing that's more innovative, and can be a differentiator, is the idea of decoupling management from innovation in terms of career progression,” Avdi said. “Companies can say, ‘We're going to invest in your long-term path here, and it's not a stopping point if you choose not to move to a managerial role or responsibilities. In fact, we're going to offer you an opportunity to double down on innovation, with advancement opportunities where your primary focus continues to be innovating and developing differentiating products — services that don't require you to become a manager of people.”
“I think that's one of the more creative options I've seen, where people now have a defined path and they can say, ‘Yes, I can still advance, and I don't have to take on responsibilities that are different from what got me into this industry in the first place,’” Avdi said.
As employees look for advancement, they might feel AI technology is following close behind — improving its ability to perform many of their former job functions.
AI: Ready to replace?
One of the biggest reasons that tech workers want to advance is to stay ahead of AI. Our tech CFO survey respondents certainly plan to expand AI capabilities, listing them as the top technology investment for 2025.
As AI capabilities improve, they can reliably perform a growing amount of the work that has filled traditional roles — even roles that had job security in the past.
“AI is even affecting people with important skills in the tech industry, like software engineers,” Avdi said. “Their jobs were almost never at risk before but, with the advances in GenAI, roles like developers can become at-risk positions.” What is the likelihood of tech industry workforce reductions as a result of improved AI capabilities?
Likelihood of layoffs
CFO survey respondents indicated that AI and automation implementations are the top way they plan to mitigate labor costs. Looking further ahead, 46% said that economic conditions could push them to make layoffs in the next 6 months — up from 31% that anticipated layoffs in last year’s survey.
At the same time, it can be difficult to implement AI capabilities that fit a company’s unique business processes, needs and staff structures. Companies need to help employees and recruits understand how AI will fit into their work, and how their roles will continue to change and evolve in the organization. “It’s a matter of how workers adapt to GenAI, how people starting out in the tech industry adapt to GenAI and how companies deal with potential obsolescence or reduced demand for certain skills that were always evergreen in tech — whether they are shifting people to keep them relevant and valuable,” Avdi said.
In a way, this is an old issue for the tech industry. “As technology advances, some skills become less prevalent even if they used to be incredibly desirable,” Leder said. “There’s always been the risk of, ‘This project is no longer relevant. Something came in and replaced it. We're switching to focus on different areas.’ Tech is always chasing that next enabler and that next set of skills. That means some skills become irrelevant as new skills are becoming more prevalent.”
As some tech companies weigh technology expansion against workforce contraction, they also need to consider the employees who will remain — and their readiness for the new technologies.
GenAI readiness
GenAI is now a central development focus for many tech companies, especially in use cases that help drive business performance. In our survey, 94% of respondents said their organizations are somewhat or very likely to use GenAI tools to drive performance this year.
Traditionally, that would mean companies need to ramp up their GenAI skill acquisition and development — however, 80% of our CFO survey respondents said they already have the necessary talent in house.
Given all of the potential applications, benefits and risks of new GenAI capabilities, why aren’t companies racing to acquire and develop new talent?
“I think there's a lack of imagination that’s most likely in evidence there,” Sheehan said. “It takes a breadth of vision about what's going on, and seeing it in other areas, to truly be able to address GenAI.” GenAI solutions can be much more than just giving employees access to a prompt, but many companies have not developed a strategy for where and how they want GenAI to drive their business — or the talent they will need to get there.
“Look at the collective whole of the industry, where it's moving, and what's actually working to create ROI with GenAI implementations,” Schulz said. “There are a few companies where I would say they're writing the story of GenAI, and that's probably where the infrastructure and talent really sit. For the rest of the industry, they need to leverage people who have subject matter expertise in the area, and actually that might be outside of their organizations.”
Schulz said that some tech companies aren’t clear about how much expertise they truly have. “I think some are over-indexing on their current workforce and its capabilities. There's a lot of AI-washing on resumes. To get true talent, you have to stress test, because there's a very limited set of people who actually know how to deploy generative AI effectively. There are a lot of people talking about it, but do they have any substance in terms of true use cases?”
Use cases
When companies start to explore the real potential of GenAI and its advanced use cases, they start to consider the investments, returns and partners who can help them succeed. “I talk with a number of CFOs who ask, ‘What is the best ROI for AI — and which companies should I be using?’” Schulz said.
The question about AI partners can be difficult to answer, partly due to the turbulence among AI service providers. “There's a lot of frothiness in the industry at this point,” Schulz said. “Who's vetting the service providers that the company might come to rely upon? What's the longevity of the service provider? Are they going to be using your data? You're building them into your tech stack at this point in time, but are you making an investment in a player that might not be there for the long haul?”
Many common providers and use cases are in the relatively established realm of customer chatbots. Our survey shows that customer experiences are the most common AI use cases, with process automation a close second, followed by business analytics, R&D and service delivery at almost the same level.
However, new use cases are emerging. “We’re seeing more AI in document review and development functions, where users can drop large documents for review, discussion and analysis, then get responses from that,” Sheehan said. “They can upload a group of documents and ask, ‘Does our policy cover this issue?’ Or, they can say ‘Give me a summary of what policy is in place. Tell me what this document means. What does this contract mean? What are stipulations?’ It’s leveraging the review of items in more of a co-pilot function.”
Apart from document analysis and software development, technology companies are also seeing returns from use cases like:
- Predictive maintenance where AI solutions analyze data from sensors to anticipate hardware failures and trigger activities that will reduce downtime and maintenance costs
- Personalized experiences beyond customer support, where AI technology can analyze user behavior to tailor product functions and content — or enable voice and image recognition for better accessibility
- Product design where AI capabilities can analyze market trends and user feedback to suggest product features and improvements that accelerate innovation
- Supply chain risk mitigation and optimization where AI analysis can help predict demand, manage inventory and reduce logistics costs
- Marketing analysis where AI analyzes consumer behavior and provides suggestions for targeted marketing campaigns, learning from what increases conversion rates and ROI
New AI use cases come with new risks, and survey respondents identified data privacy and security concerns as their top concern with GenAI.
At the same time, GenAI can be part of the solution. Respondents said that IT and cybersecurity are, by far, the business functions receiving most of their focus for GenAI solutions.
GenAI can be both a concern and a solution for data security and privacy. “Companies need to find ways to protect the corporate information from being entered into AI, sucked into a large language model and then handed off to somewhere else,” Sheehan said. “We've seen examples where somebody took internal code, dropped it into a GenAI interface, and then someone else queried the code and saw the specific instructions that came from the originator.”
“There are tools that can help protect corporate information — companies need a buffer between what someone inputs and what goes out to the LLM,” Sheehan said. “That's a protection mechanism that companies should consider, to protect their intellectual property from getting accidentally published by well-intentioned employees.”
Data security needs can change as companies explore new use cases for GenAI, so companies need to understand and manage the risks.
Cybersecurity: Training and awareness
GenAI technology is the latest weapon in the arms race between cybersecurity attackers and defenders. Yet, one factor remains the same — humans are the greatest cybersecurity weakness.
In fact, an investment in training and awareness is the top cybersecurity measure that our survey respondents prioritized.
External expertise
While training is the top priority, at 33% it is a decrease from the 37% it had in the same question on last year’s survey. Meanwhile, partnering with external security firms moved from 9% last year to 21% this year, surpassing security audits.
“With the SEC requirement for cybersecurity disclosures, we might have seen an initial investment last year,” Schulz said. Sheehan added, “The security audit isn't there to establish the high-end goal. It's usually to establish a baseline, and companies need to make sure they meet those baselines. Then, partnering with external firms can take their capabilities up a notch from there.”
The importance of cybersecurity, and competition for cybersecurity skills, continues to grow in tandem with the growth of business technology. External partnerships can help companies achieve scalability or access specialized expertise to augment their in-house capabilities. “As some skills within cybersecurity become more hyper-focused, some companies are realizing that they don't have the depth of talent to keep up with the rapid changes we're seeing,” Schulz said.
Spending trends
Cybersecurity technology must race to stay ahead of the rapid changes in AI and other technologies across business functions. In fact, our survey respondents indicated that the cybersecurity and risk management functions are their top priority for enhancements.
Cybersecurity spending might be even larger than these responses indicate, since it is increasingly woven into the planning and costs for every technology project and solution. “I think the bucket of money that’s labeled as ‘cybersecurity’ is starting to get fractured,” Sheehan said. “To combat the threat actors out there, companies often budget AI projects that actually have a component which is cybersecurity.”
Cybersecurity services are also being consolidated into fewer providers, with solutions that extend across the enterprise. “Large companies are doing a lot of land grabs in cybersecurity, trying to expand their base,” Sheehan said. “As a result, their clients are getting more commonalities across tools. Instead of spending money on a best-of-breed product in each area, they’re getting one vendor that works across multiple areas.” Schulz agreed, “We're seeing more of the big vendors take different functions and features that were best-of-breed at smaller companies, baking them into package platform offerings.”
Effective cybersecurity requires updated technology — but ultimately depends on culture as well. “It's about really making sure that you're staying ahead of the AI and evolving your workforce's mindset,” Schulz said. “They need to be critically thinking about the threats and how they're protecting the company. Your biggest risk is still your people, and they need to have the right professional skepticism.”
Foster culture that fosters success
Across our survey results, CFOs reflected the importance of workforce development, how that workforce is empowered with AI technology, and how that technology is protected with cybersecurity.
“All of that plays together, and you need a strong culture at the center,” Leder said. A strong culture provides the core that drives the success of your workforce, technology and cybersecurity together, so that companies can achieve their business goals. “You want to make sure that people have a work/life balance, while they’re being tech-forward by adopting and innovating new solutions.” Innovation emerges from the ground up — it needs to come from internal research and development, more than from acquisitions, cost controls or incremental measures — as our CFO survey reflected.
Tech companies need a culture that fosters their innovation, to foster their future. They need a cycle of workers and technology that support each other to feed business growth. “You need virtual solutions and collaboration that can inspire innovation and creativity without burning people out,” Leder said. “That's a critical way to retain and attract the best talent, from around the world.”
In an industry that’s built on ideas, the success of technology companies often comes down to whether they can recruit, retain, motivate and empower the best workers. Build a culture that provides a core for all of your business goals.
Contacts:
Andrea Schulz
National Managing Principal, Technology Industry,
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC
Partner, Audit Services, Grant Thornton LLP
Andrea Schulz serves as Grant Thornton’s national managing partner for Technology. In this role, she oversees the growth and operations of the firm’s Technology industry practice, which encompasses a full range of audit, tax and advisory services.
San Jose, California
Industries
- Technology, media & telecommunications
Service Experience
- Audit & Assurance
Jesse Leder
Experienced Manager, Growth Advisory
Manhattan, New York
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