While business leaders are increasingly looking to cloud and IT as core profit centres, new research has exposed a widening gap between their ambitions and the readiness of their organisations, raising concerns about wasted investments, stalled innovation, and growing cybersecurity risks.

Based on insights from 1,000 C-Suite and IT execs around the world, the latest report from tech solutions firm Unisys, From Complexity to Clarity: Modernizing Cloud and IT for What Comes Next, found that despite surging interest in emerging technologies, most organisations currently lack the IT core to support innovation, a problem most visible in AI development.

Unisys found that more than three-quarters (78%) of firms plan to increase investment in genAI, and 73% of executives view agentic AI as critical to staying competitive, but only around a third (36%) are ready to support large-scale AI workloads.

The data shows that businesses are in danger of allowing their tech investments to overtake strategic purpose and miss out on meaningful ROI.

For example, 82% of innovation leaders are already allocating more than 6% of their IT budgets to genAI data management, even as most business leaders admit their firm is ill-equipped to meet future cyber threats, with only 14% prepared for post-quantum cryptography.

Meanwhile, the average cloud budget has skyrocketed to $160 million (£119m), but even as money continues to be funnelled to zeitgeisty projects, fewer than half of executives are fully satisfied with their ROI on cloud, automation, or genAI.

According to Unisys’ study, businesses would be better off investing in modernising outdated infrastructure to support AI and quantum adoption further down the line.

Just 32% are ready for quantum computing, despite the likes of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip proving that useful quantum computers could be years rather than decades away.

The report identified similar infrastructure readiness gaps across emerging technologies, including edge computing (34%) and even augmented and virtual reality, long accepted in enterprise circles, but which are supported by just 35% of IT environments.

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These are not new problems, said Unisys, with a similar survey two years ago finding that outdated infrastructure and a lack of alignment between business and IT were among the top five challenges for cloud adoption.

This is beginning to have a tangible impact on security, as well as innovation. In the past year, 17% of organisations admitted a breach, with downtime costs reaching up to $500,000 (£371,482) per hour, and 85% firms have not managed the shift to proactive cybersecurity postures. 

“The next wave of technological disruption is already underway, yet many organisations are still operating on outdated foundations and processes,” said Manju Naglapur, a senior vice president at Unisys. 

“To fully realise the potential of technologies like generative and agentic AI, organisations need to modernise their infrastructure, align IT and business priorities, and adopt a more proactive approach to cybersecurity.”