UK Businesses Abandon Old Playbook: Travel and AI Budgets Soar While Ad Spending Crashes”

QUICK ANSWER What’s happening? UK businesses ditched blunt cost-cutting in 2025, with travel spending surging 12% while advertising budgets crashed 28%—one of the steepest declines across major categories. Why it matters: Companies are making surgical investments in growth-driving activities like AI tools and face-to-face sales while slashing brand marketing, signaling a fundamental shift in business priorities. What’s next: The trend toward decentralized, productivity-focused spending suggests traditional marketing budgets may never recover to pre-2025 levels.

The era of across-the-board cost cutting is officially over. UK businesses have moved into what Soldo’s Spending Trends Spring Index 2026 calls “targeted cost optimization”—a sophisticated approach that’s seeing companies pour money into travel and AI while brutally slashing advertising budgets.

This isn’t your typical recession playbook. Instead of cutting everything, businesses are making calculated bets on activities that directly drive revenue and productivity, creating winners and losers that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

The Great Spending Realignment

The numbers tell a remarkable story of strategic reallocation. While travel and entertainment spending jumped 12% year-on-year in 2025, advertising spend plummeted 28%—making it one of the sharpest declines across all major spending categories.

This isn’t about companies having more or less money. It’s about radically different priorities. Businesses are backing activities that generate immediate, measurable returns while abandoning traditional brand-building exercises that offer uncertain payoffs.

The divide becomes even starker when examining company size. Large UK businesses increased travel spending by 17%, compared to just 8% for smaller firms. This suggests that bigger organizations are leading the charge back to high-value, in-person business activities while smaller companies remain cautious about discretionary spending.

Business Travel: From Cost Center to Strategic Weapon

After years of Zoom fatigue and virtual relationship-building, UK companies are rediscovering the irreplaceable value of face-to-face interaction. The 12% surge in travel and entertainment spending represents more than just a return to normalcy—it’s a strategic recognition that physical presence drives deals, builds trust, and accelerates collaboration in ways digital tools cannot replicate.

Large businesses are particularly aggressive in this space, with 17% spending increases reflecting their ability to measure travel’s direct impact on revenue generation. These companies understand that a single successful client meeting or internal collaboration session can justify significant travel investments.

The trend extends beyond traditional sales activities into what Soldo identifies as “client delivery and in-person collaboration.” This suggests companies are using travel not just for new business development but for deepening existing relationships and solving complex problems that require physical presence.

For European business strategy, this represents a competitive advantage for companies willing to invest in high-quality business relationships over purely digital interactions.

The AI Investment Acceleration

While advertising budgets get slashed, technology spending—particularly on artificial intelligence—continues its relentless upward trajectory. This creates a fascinating paradox: companies are cutting spend on human persuasion (advertising) while increasing investment in machine intelligence.

The most revealing aspect of AI spending patterns is the shift from general-purpose tools toward specialized platforms. Average spending on AI-native coding tools like Cursor exploded by 994%, while Anthropic saw 489% growth. These aren’t consumer-facing AI toys—they’re productivity multipliers that directly impact operational efficiency.

This trend toward specialized AI tools indicates that businesses have moved beyond experimentation into serious implementation. Companies are no longer asking whether AI will transform their operations, but rather which specific tools will deliver the highest productivity gains.

The contrast between rising AI spend and falling advertising budgets suggests a fundamental shift in how businesses think about investment returns. Productivity tools offer measurable, immediate benefits, while advertising effectiveness becomes increasingly difficult to track and optimize.

The Advertising Apocalypse

The 28% collapse in UK advertising spending represents more than cyclical belt-tightening—it signals a permanent reevaluation of marketing’s role in business strategy. Companies are questioning whether traditional advertising delivers sufficient returns to justify its costs, particularly when AI tools can achieve similar outcomes through direct customer engagement and operational efficiency.

This dramatic reduction affects multiple advertising categories simultaneously: mainstream media, paid marketing, and market research all faced significant cuts. The breadth of the decline suggests businesses aren’t just shifting advertising strategies—they’re fundamentally questioning advertising’s value proposition.

For marketing technology companies and advertising agencies, this trend represents an existential challenge. Traditional brand-building activities may need complete reinvention to remain relevant in an environment where businesses demand immediate, measurable returns on every investment.

Operational Spending Takes Center Stage

Perhaps the most significant structural change revealed in the data is operational spending’s dominance. Day-to-day purchases now account for nearly two-thirds (63%) of all transactions, reflecting what Soldo calls “decentralized” spending patterns across teams.

This shift indicates that businesses are empowering individual teams and departments to make more autonomous purchasing decisions, moving away from centralized procurement processes that can slow operational efficiency. Shopping, food, services, and transport spending all increased, contributing to a 16% year-on-year rise in operational spend overall.

The decentralization trend creates both opportunities and challenges. While it enables faster decision-making and improved operational agility, it also requires sophisticated financial technology systems to maintain visibility and control across distributed purchasing patterns.

Strategic Implications for Business Leaders

The spending patterns revealed in Soldo’s research represent a fundamental shift in business strategy philosophy. Companies are abandoning traditional budget allocation models in favor of dynamic, ROI-focused approaches that prioritize measurable outcomes over conventional business practices.

This evolution creates significant competitive advantages for early adopters while potentially leaving traditional business models vulnerable. Organizations that continue operating under old assumptions about marketing effectiveness and operational spending may find themselves at severe disadvantages.

For European businesses competing in global markets, these trends suggest that success increasingly depends on operational efficiency and direct customer engagement rather than brand awareness and marketing reach.

The Technology-First Future

The simultaneous rise in AI spending and decline in advertising budgets points toward a future where technological capability trumps marketing sophistication. Businesses are betting that superior tools and operational efficiency will generate more sustainable competitive advantages than traditional brand-building activities.

This technological focus extends beyond AI into broader digital transformation initiatives. Companies are recognizing that internal capability development through technology investment offers more predictable returns than external marketing spend, particularly in uncertain economic environments.

The shift toward specialized AI tools rather than general-purpose solutions indicates increasing sophistication in technology adoption. Businesses are moving beyond broad digital transformation toward targeted, function-specific technological enhancements that directly impact operational outcomes.

Looking Forward: Permanent or Cyclical?

Sacha Herrmann, Soldo’s Chief Financial Officer, notes that “businesses are no longer cutting costs across the board” but instead making “selective investments in areas like travel and technology to support business modernisation and digital agility.”

This strategic selectivity suggests the spending patterns observed in 2025 may represent permanent changes rather than cyclical adjustments. Companies appear to have discovered more efficient ways to allocate resources that prioritize direct business impact over traditional expense categories.

For business leaders planning 2026 strategies, the data indicates that successful organizations will continue prioritizing productivity-enhancing investments while maintaining skepticism toward spending categories that cannot demonstrate clear, measurable returns.

The decentralization of spending decisions, combined with increased focus on operational efficiency and technology adoption, suggests that traditional corporate budgeting processes may require fundamental restructuring to remain competitive in this new environment.

The companies that thrive will be those that embrace this new spending paradigm while developing systems to maintain visibility and control across increasingly distributed purchasing decisions.

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