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Business leaders sound off on U.S. tariff impact

U.S. tariffs are reshaping tech budgets. Some CIOs feel the squeeze, while others see limited impact. The full effects may hit harder in 2026.

Staff report
By
Published: 01 Oct 2025

U.S. tariffs have touched every industry, including retail, automotive, travel and technology.

So far in 2025, global growth has remained resilient, as many businesses front-loaded goods production and trade ahead of higher tariffs. But the U.S. and world economies have not realized the full tariff impact yet. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that will likely change in 2026.

According to the OECD report Finding the Right Balance in Uncertain Times, global GDP growth is projected to decrease from 3.3% in 2024, to 3.2% in 2025 and 2.9% in 2026. The annual GDP in the U.S. is projected to decline from 2.8% in 2024 to 1.8% in 2025 and 1.5% in 2026.

So how have businesses in the tech industry fared? We asked seven business leaders the following question:

How have U.S. tariffs affected your technology spend?

 "They are and will impact spending. The IT budget was fixed for the year before the current administration took office. The tariffs do not mean we can simply increase the budget to cover them. It means we can only purchase a double-digit -- in terms of the percentage of cost -- less than planned. Tariffs are not good for every business." 

-- Ronald Blahnik, former CIO and managing partner at Blahnik Consulting Services

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"We're lucky that our business is not super capital-intensive -- we don't build our own data centers. Most of the things we consume are SaaS -- not on prem -- and it's taken a while for those costs to start impacting our vendors and for them to pass it on to us." 

-- Graeme Thompson, CIO of Informatica 

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"They're not, at the moment. As far as I'm aware, they've had no impact on us. There are changes coming in, I think that eventually may have some impact. But at the moment, we're not seeing any impact -- but keeping a close eye on it." 

-- David Sewell, CTO at Synechron 

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"Maybe indirectly. We haven't actually started to see anything like drastic vendor increases yet, probably because we are not close to the hardware space. Maybe we'll see it soon, but it's been OK so far." 

-- Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, co-founder and CTO at DataChat 

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"At the moment, it's only going to come through potentially in hardware, but we haven't seen that. But most of it won't affect the software or cloud or anything like that." 

-- Joe Locandro, global CIO and executive vice president at Rimini Street 

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"I haven't found a trickling effect on us, to be honest. I think people in hardware probably did a lot." 

-- Shay Levi, co-founder and CEO of Unframe AI 

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 "So right now, we aren't really overly impacted by tariffs. I haven't seen any issue on supply chain or procurement of product for us in higher ed. The bigger issue has been the impact of federal funding. So, what I'm seeing from my peers is it's one of the two that are still having impact on business. It just almost depends on what vertical you're in that is more deterministic of that impact."

-- Howard Miller, CIO at UCLA Anderson School of Management

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