As businesses race to roll out more cutting-edge AI solutions, backend teams are feeling the strain, with new research showing that the growing complexity of organisations’ tools and infrastructure is beginning to hinder operations.

Software platform Temporal Technologies latest State of Development Report found that nearly half (49%) of large companies are relying on custom-built solutions, but 75% of the backend teams building them are hampered by issues like a lack of support for long-running processes, high operational overheads, and failure recovery challenges.   

That is leading to more brittle systems, with the study revealing that despite nearly all (94%) of technical professionals now using AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT in their workflows, just 39% are building frameworks to support the use of AI at scale.

Scaling is proving difficult for many, with 35% of decision-makers highlighting it as a key obstacle, which, coupled with a lack of visibility (20%) and observability (22%), points to deeper infrastructure and monitoring gaps.

However, despite engineers scrambling to keep up with business leaders’ AI demands, reliability and compliance are still their top development priorities over the next two years (36%), higher even than automation (33%) or reducing technical debt (30%).

The report, based on a survey of over 220 backend engineers and decision makers worldwide, found that security remains a perennial roadblock, with 36% of respondents citing it as the top barrier to current systems, while 47% say it’s their biggest concern when adopting new tools.

Decision-makers said their teams are also struggling with the complexity of the technology they’re forced to work with (33%), as well as problems integrating it with existing systems (32%) and a lack of skilled resources (26%).

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These pressures are risking serious system failures, which, aside from technical headaches, come with hefty business costs.

Around half (48%) of decision-makers said that customer churn is their biggest fear when things go down, while another 47% say downtime drives up operational costs. Just 5% said that failures would have ‘no major impact’.    

“The report tells us a lot of what we hear from partners every day—backend challenges aren’t just technical, they’re also organisational,” said Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal Technologies. 

“Engineers and decision makers are prioritising different things, and that disconnect is driving tooling delays, reliability risks, and rising complexity across the stack. AI is only adding another layer of scale and unpredictability.”