Just six percent of enterprises believe their data infrastructure is AI ready

Only six percent of enterprise AI leaders say their data infrastructure is fully ready for AI according to a new report from CData Software.

The research exposes a divide in AI preparedness. 60 percent of companies at the highest level of AI maturity have also invested in advanced data infrastructure, while 53 percent of organizations struggling with AI implementations are hampered by immature data systems. The gap is costing companies time, money, and competitive advantage.

"The era of AI being constrained by models is over. Today, AI is constrained by data," says Amit Sharma, CEO and co-founder of CData. "The organizations winning with AI aren't the ones with the best algorithms; they're the ones with connected, contextual, and semantically consistent data infrastructure."

Among other findings, 71 percent of AI teams spend over a quarter of their time on data plumbing instead of innovation. Connectivity complexity is exploding is an issue too, 46 percent of organizations need real-time access to six or more data sources for a single AI use case.

Real-time data is universally critical but still missing in many cases. 100 percent agree real-time data is essential for AI agents, yet 20 percent still lack real-time integration capabilities

Infrastructure maturity is the great divide though. All high-AI-maturity organizations have built centralized, semantically consistent integration layers whereas 80 percent of low-maturity providers haven't even started.

Only nine percent of organizations now rank AI model development as their top investment priority, while 83 percent are investing in or planning centralized, semantically consistent data access layers.

"Organizations are realizing that AI success isn't determined by the sophistication of their models. It's determined by the maturity of their data infrastructure," adds Sharma. "The companies gaining real value from AI are the ones that invested early in connected, real-time data access. Those that haven't will find themselves at a significant competitive disadvantage."

The full report is available from the CData site.

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