How to maximize ROI from your IT budget

In this article

• Make the shift from reactive to proactive IT
• Invest in AI (where it counts)
• Avoid tool sprawl and hidden costs
• Summary

 

Global IT spending grew significantly in 2025. And although 74% of IT leaders expect budgets to rise again in 2026, more than half say they lack the internal resources to fix issues quickly or drive meaningful innovation.

That’s the paradox many IT managers are living with right now: spending is up, but the pressure on them and their team hasn’t eased.

So what’s happening?

The short answer is this: not all IT investments are created equal. Simply throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee better outcomes or ROI.

Instead, return on investment comes when IT leaders invest in technology that helps their teams save time and work smarter, not harder.

In this article, we’ll look at three practical ways leaders can maximize ROI from their IT budget.

We’ll also show how a unified digital workplace platform, like TeamViewer ONE, supports that goal in a measurable way.

Shift from reactive to proactive IT

For many IT teams, each day looks like the last: a queue full of tickets, the same issues resurfacing over and over, and no end in sight.

This cycle of reactive firefighting is exhausting and unsustainable. IT teams remain stuck reacting to incidents rather than preventing them. And they’re left with little time to identify patterns, improve systems, or get ahead of the next outage.

Proactive IT, on the other hand, focuses on preventing IT issues before they affect users.

The shift from fixing problems after they happen to resolving them before they escalate is one of the most powerful ROI levers teams have at their disposal.

Think about it: when you can respond to underlying issues before they cause downtime it means fewer incidents. Fewer incidents mean fewer tickets. Fewer tickets mean more time for teams to focus on strategic work.  

Proactive IT also has a direct impact on productivity. When devices perform reliably, and issues are resolved quietly in the background, employees stay productive, frustration is avoided, and businesses see stronger results.

How TeamViewer ONE helps

TeamViewer ONE enables IT teams to make the shift to proactive IT without adding complexity.  

With built-in digital employee experience (DEX) technology, teams gain real-time visibility into device health, performance, applications, operating systems, and security status.

Instead of waiting for users to report problems, teams can see early warning signs, such as degrading performance or failing services, and act immediately.

Using DEX, you can even automatically resolve common issues without human intervention. That means less downtime, fewer tickets, and faster resolution.

The result is a proactive IT model that scales with your environment and delivers consistent ROI.

Invest in AI (where it counts)

AI budgets are skyrocketing, and for good reason. Used well, AI can generate significant productivity gains across IT operations. Used poorly, it just becomes another expensive experiment.

The key to ROI isn’t adopting AI for its own sake but applying it where it reduces manual effort and helps teams make better decisions.

In IT support, that often means eliminating repetitive tasks, improving knowledge sharing, and speeding up resolution times.

How TeamViewer ONE helps

TeamViewer ONE includes TeamViewer AI, powerful AI features that integrate directly into remote support workflows.

It starts with Tia, your support team’s intelligent AI assistance Tia uses live device data and performance logs to help diagnose the root cause and suggest next steps. This significantly speeds up troubleshooting and resolution times.

At the end of each support session, Session Insights uses AI to automatically generate a compliance-ready summary. By eliminating manual effort, it saves up to five minutes with every session.

Once tickets are resolved, Session Analytics helps IT leaders identify patterns, recurring issues, and monitor their team's time. With this knowledge, teams become more efficient with every fix.

The ROI is clear:

• Lower mean time to resolution (MTTR)
• Hours saved with automated documentation
• Faster handovers
• Actionable knowledge and insights that scale expertise

Avoid tool sprawl and hidden costs

One of the biggest drains on IT ROI is tool sprawl.

Tool sprawl refers to the accumulation of an unnecessarily large number of IT tools by an organization.

In the case of IT support, over time, many teams end up with separate tools for remote support, endpoint management, monitoring, automation, reporting, and so on.

Oftentimes, this creates tool overlap and data silos. This makes it harder for IT teams to see the full picture, slowing down decision-making and response times.

Tool sprawl also increases total cost of ownership (TCO) in ways that are easy to overlook:

• Managing multiple licenses and renewals
• Integration and maintenance overhead
• Training requirements for different systems
• Slower troubleshooting due to fragmented data

In contrast, when teams work with a smaller number of integrated tools, or better yet, a single platform with shared data and workflows, they spend less time switching between apps and more time solving problems. Governance and security are also improved, and reporting becomes more clear. All of which contributes directly to a stronger ROI.

How TeamViewer ONE helps

TeamViewer ONE is a unified digital workplace platform that brings everything together:

• Secure remote access and support
• Digital employee experience (DEX)
• Endpoint management and security
• Remote monitoring and management
• Hardware and software asset management
• Patch management
• Software distribution management

Instead of piecing together multiple point solutions, IT teams work from a single platform with a consolidated view of devices, users, and software.

This unified approach lowers TCO while improving operational efficiency. It also makes it easier to scale as organizations grow, without increasing headcount or complexity.

Summary

Growing budgets alone won’t deliver better outcomes for IT leaders. ROI improves when leaders invest in tools that help them save time, automate work, and simplify operations.

By shifting to proactive IT, applying AI where it delivers measurable impact, and reducing tool sprawl, organizations can turn IT from a cost center into a value driver.

TeamViewer ONE supports this transformation by unifying remote access, intelligent automation, experience monitoring, and endpoint management into one digital workplace platform. With TeamViewer ONE, every dollar works harder.