A Unisys study of how organizations are adapting their strategies to support new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), agentic AI, and quantum computing finds what it calls a widening gap between business ambitions and IT readiness.
The report warns that the gap can lead to wasted investments, stalled innovation, and growing cybersecurity risks.
Unisys also found more than 100 respondents that it calls “Innovation Leaders” who developed smart IT infrastructure and investment decisions.
Other key findings in the report:
- 78% of organizations plan to increase investment in GenAI and 73% of executives view agentic AI as critical to staying competitive.
- 36% say they are ready to support large-scale AI workloads.
- 82% of executives view cloud and IT as profit centers, though less than half are fully satisfied with the ROI on cloud, automation, and GenAI. Despite this, three-quarters are still increasing their investments.
- Only 14% of business executives say they’re prepared for post-quantum cryptography.
- 85% of organizations describe their cybersecurity posture as reactive, even as the cost of downtime continues to rise drastically.
The study also said that 73% of business executives warn that failing to adopt agentic AI could lead to a competitive risk. For this reason, 82% already are allocating more than 6% of their IT budgets to GenAI-enabled data management.
Unisys found that 78% of organizations intend to increase their GenAI spending, which suggests they have confidence in its potential to drive innovation and sharpen their competitive advantages.
The other side of the coin is that there is a general acknowledgement that current infrastructure falls short. Outdated infrastructure, lack of talent, and misalignment between business and IT were on the list of the top five cloud challenges.
Only 36% of organizations say their organizations are capable of supporting large-scale GenAI workloads and data volumes. Readiness is lower for quantum computing (32%) and edge computing (34%). Even augmented and virtual reality are adequately supported by just 35% of IT environments despite being on the table for a good deal of time.
“The next wave of technological disruption is already underway, yet many organizations are still operating on outdated foundations and processes,” Manju Naglapur, Unisys’ senior vice president and general manager of cloud, applications and infrastructure solutions, said in a press release about the study.
“To fully realize the potential of technologies like generative and agentic AI, organizations need to modernize their infrastructure, align IT and business priorities, and adopt a more proactive approach to cybersecurity.”