We are an IT services company, but our CIO/CTO is under the CFO in the hierachy. That's tells you everything you need to know about our strategic priorities: minimise short term cost at likely long term cost.

Everything is "doing more with less", asking us to lower expenses like licensing costs as if we can just pick which machines can be turned off or just tell the vendors to not raise prices, cutting teams in half and surprised Pikachu face when we either spend the days firefighting AND quality decreases, and a long et cetera.

The ideal sceneario our CFO wants to see is creatio ex nihilo i.e. creation out of nothing, infinite work from zero money.

The do not understand there is a minimum cost for any operation, EVEN if they had a magic AI that did all the work of 10000 people, it will still use something: electricity, hardware repairs, software improvements, data feeding, token fees, you name it, and those things need to be paid.

Of course this is not only my company, all companies are looking into cost-cutting initiatives. But they are harming mid and long term growth and business sustainability for short terms "savings". You save nothing long term, if your short term cuts need to be reversed later, at more expensive rates, you lose customers in the process if your quality goes down too much, and you spend more reverting the savings. For a net gain of zero, but lots of intermediate pain.