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The Infrastructure Gap: Why Most Companies Aren’t Ready for the AI Revolution

Daniel Davenport
5 min readFeb 9, 2025

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Despite investments pouring into artificial intelligence — with spending expected to reach $1 trillion — most enterprises face a sobering reality: their technological foundations weren’t built for AI’s demands.

Only 22% of organizations have infrastructure capable of supporting AI workloads, according to a new global study by Economist Impact.

This gap between AI ambition and architectural readiness threatens to become a critical bottleneck in the AI revolution.

Unlocking enterprise AI

The Legacy Challenge

Many of the world’s largest companies are operating with what amounts to “Victorian-era plumbing” in their data infrastructure. These aging systems weren’t designed for AI’s unique demands: the need to process vast amounts of unstructured data, handle real-time inference, and support complex machine learning operations.

“Most of the value that you see on AI is buried in the bottom,” notes Senthil Ramani, global lead for data and AI at Accenture. “The top is immediate benefits like productivity, but that’s the starting…

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Daniel Davenport
Daniel Davenport

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