Every organisation wants to capture the benefits of AI – faster delivery, better insight, greater automation and reduced operational cost. Yet many AI programmes stall before they ever reach production. Models fail to scale, proof-of-concepts take months longer than expected, and leaders begin to wonder why their investment isn’t translating into real outcomes.

The underlying issue is rarely the model, the tooling or the size of the team. The real blocker is the foundation those AI initiatives depend on: data that is incomplete or inconsistent, pipelines held together by years of shortcuts, and engineering teams overloaded with maintenance that should have been retired long ago.

Research from McKinsey indicates that roughly 20–40% of the value tied up in a typical technology estate is effectively lost to technical debt. Gartner’s analysis shows that around 40% of infrastructure platforms are affected by ongoing debt risks. The numbers paint a clear picture – a substantial proportion of IT budgets is consumed by maintaining yesterday’s decisions rather than enabling tomorrow’s innovation.

Industry research consistently highlights this problem. A large proportion of the typical technology estate’s value is consumed by technical debt, and a significant amount of infrastructure operates under persistent strain. The result is predictable: a considerable share of your engineering investment goes into maintaining decisions made years earlier rather than enabling the innovation your business now needs.

The Hidden Cost of Yesterday’s Shortcuts

This pattern plays out in organisations of every size. You hire engineers to accelerate delivery, but a substantial portion of their capacity disappears into patching brittle components, working around integration gaps or stabilising systems that simply cannot cope with growth.

Even the engineers focused on new features are forced to slow down. Every workaround becomes tomorrow’s maintenance load. Every quick fix added under deadline pressure becomes next quarter’s blocker. And because this never appears on a dashboard, leaders see the symptoms rather than the cause: slow progress, inconsistent delivery, rising operational cost and teams struggling against the weight of accumulated decisions.

When AI enters the conversation, the strain becomes impossible to ignore. AI initiatives depend on clean, well-structured, trustworthy data. If your teams are already spending a large share of their time fighting fires, there is no headroom to support the data maturity, governance and platform reliability that AI requires.

Why AI Fails Without Solid Foundations

No matter how strong your ambition is, AI cannot perform well on top of fragmented pipelines, undocumented integrations or legacy systems that consume 40% of your engineering capacity just to remain operational. Any organisation attempting to scale AI without addressing these issues first will encounter the same pattern: pilots that never progress, models that produce inconsistent outputs and delivery teams that cannot support AI safely in production.

The organisations moving fastest with AI in 2025 are not necessarily those with the biggest budgets or the most advanced modelling teams. They are the ones that invested in fixing the foundations – enabling their engineers to spend the majority of their time driving progress rather than maintaining the past.

Is Your Organisation Ready for AI, or are you Still Paying for the Past?

The question leaders should be asking is simple: how much of your engineering capacity is spent on maintenance versus innovation? And what could your organisation achieve if that balance shifted?

If your systems are consuming too much of your team’s time, AI will only expose the gaps. But with the right foundations and the right support, AI can transform how your business delivers value.

Vertex Agility helps you fix the core issues first, then accelerate your AI initiatives with confidence. If you’re ready to strengthen your delivery capability and unlock the full potential of AI, we’re ready to help.

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How Vertex Agility Helps You Fix Your Data Foundations

Vertex Agility provides delivery teams and specialists who focus on strengthening the systems, pipelines and engineering practices your organisation relies on. Before AI can deliver value, you need trustworthy, accessible and consistent data. We help you get there by:

• Assessing the state of your data landscape and identifying where technical debt is blocking progress

• Improving and modernising pipelines so data becomes reliable, observable and scalable

• Reducing fragility across integration layers and legacy components

• Establishing engineering practices that minimise future maintenance and avoid re-accumulating debt

• Creating clear, dependable data flows that support both operational needs and future AI use cases

This work increases engineering capacity, improves platform stability and removes the silent constraints that slow down every major strategic initiative.

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How Vertex Agility Then Helps You Leverage AI Effectively

Once the foundations are stable and your data is in a workable state, Vertex Agility helps you translate that maturity into meaningful AI acceleration. We support you by:

• Identifying AI opportunities that align with business outcomes rather than experimentation for its own sake

• Designing and implementing solutions that integrate safely with your modernised data landscape

• Supporting automation, insights and advanced analytics that become reliable at scale

• Enabling your teams to adopt AI-driven workflows without risking production stability

• Providing on-demand engineering talent to build, refine and operationalise AI features and services

With a solid foundation, AI becomes a strategic advantage rather than a source of distraction, risk or rework.

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Take the Next Step

To understand where your organisation stands today, complete our free AI-readiness assessment. It takes just a few minutes to complete and gives you a clear view of the gaps holding you back and the foundations you need to prioritise.

If you’d prefer a conversation, get in touch to discuss how Vertex Agility can help you fix your data, increase engineering capacity and deliver AI solutions that work at scale.