Business and IT leaders exhibit a significant disconnect on digital transformation
Talk to any business exec these days, and you’ll hear how AI is fueling their next wave of innovation. The story sounds good, pilots are running, prototypes are shipping, and everyone’s got a roadmap. But when you check in with the IT side of the house, the tone shifts. Fewer than one-third of IT leaders share that same confidence. They’re looking at the infrastructure, the systems supporting all this ambition, and realizing the foundation isn’t built for it yet. That’s a real issue.
This gap between perception and reality slows everything down. While business leaders push hard on AI, IT’s working overtime to patch legacy systems and avoid costly slowdowns. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about alignment. And right now, that alignment’s missing. Sprinting toward AI goals while your infrastructure is stuck a decade behind won’t get you far. That’s like upgrading the interface without touching the engine.
C-suite leaders need to understand the tech story under the hood. Don’t just fund innovation, fund the systems that make innovation sustainable. Collaboration between business and IT isn’t just teamwork, it’s a requirement. It keeps your organization honest about progress and clears bottlenecks before the stakes get higher.
Unisys data puts numbers to this: over 40% of business execs believe they’ve made solid progress with AI pilots, but less than one-third of IT leaders agree. That’s not just a miscommunication, it’s a signal. If your organization falls into this group, do the work to close the gap.
Existing IT infrastructure often fails to meet the demands of data-intensive AI workloads
AI isn’t lightweight. It chews through compute, scales fast, and makes serious demands on your data pipeline. You can’t fake the backend. And yet, a major portion of IT leaders, over 40%, according to Unisys, say their infrastructure flat-out can’t handle it.
This doesn’t mean your systems need to be perfect now. But if your AI efforts are scaling faster than your compute and storage layers can keep up with, and most are, you’re asking for performance bottlenecks. Models will stall, data won’t move fast enough, and the insights you need won’t arrive on time. Good talent will get frustrated. Momentum dies quietly in those kinds of delays.
The smart move here is investing in flexible, modular infrastructure that grows with you. Cloud isn’t magic. It’s just part of the solution. You also need scalable architecture, fast access to high-volume storage, and systems that are AI-ready, not AI-hopeful.
If you’re in the C-suite and your infrastructure hasn’t changed much in the last five years, it’s not ready. And if your IT team is hesitant to deploy AI at scale, listen to them. Don’t think of infrastructure investment as a cost. Think of it as enabling every product team, every insight algorithm, and every new AI use case you’re trying to push.
In the same Unisys research, more than two in five IT leaders reported their organization’s current infrastructure is not built to fully support AI. That number should be zero. If it’s not zero in your company, prioritize fixing it before you chase more advanced use cases.
Outdated cloud security policies and rigid data systems impede innovation
Most organizations say they want to innovate, move faster, build smarter systems, squeeze insight out of data. But when leadership pushes for speed, the security systems often push back. Business executives are clear on this. Nearly two-thirds of them say rigid security frameworks are limiting their ability to share and analyze data effectively. And when they look at cloud policies, they’re almost twice as likely as IT leaders to see them as blockers, not enablers.
Security can’t be an excuse to slow progress. Done well, it accelerates the right things. But too many enterprises are still operating with systems and policies designed for a different era, where data sat in silos and movement was rare. These legacy approaches don’t fit where businesses are headed now.
IT leaders tend to view these constraints differently. They’re cautious, understandably so. But the caution becomes a problem when it translates to stagnation. If policies delay access, limit integration, or prevent cross-team insight generation, innovation stalls before it begins. Technical debt isn’t just code, it’s policy too.
This is where leaders need to engage directly with IT, not just to “override” decisions but to align strategy with risk. What’s acceptable, what’s outdated, and where do policies need to evolve? Cloud security doesn’t have to slow you down. But it will if you’re applying controls that no longer match your operational needs. That conversation has to start at the C-suite level. You can’t scale innovation while treating security as a checklist.
The Unisys data makes this misalignment clear: while nearly two-thirds of business execs say security systems are holding them back, just over one-third of IT leaders agree. That’s not just difference of opinion, it’s a visibility gap. Fix that, and a lot of locked-up value becomes accessible fast.
Reactive cybersecurity strategies expose organizations to increased risks
Most companies say they’re handling cybersecurity. What they mean is that they’re responding when there’s a problem. Almost 90% of leaders in the Unisys study said their teams react to incidents, but very few have a repeatable, proactive strategy in place to stop threats before they land.
This matters because threats don’t wait for board meetings. They move faster than status updates, and if you’re always in recovery mode, you’re already behind. You can restore systems. You can’t always restore trust, time, or operational continuity. A reactive security model will cost you, especially at scale.
Being proactive isn’t about overbuilding or wasting budget on unnecessary tech. It means knowing your vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. It means integrating security into architecture, not layering it on top. And it definitely means involving the right people from the start, security shouldn’t be a separate track, it should be part of every track.
For executives, this is not just a technical issue, it’s a business risk. Security failures now hit operations, customer experience, and reputation in a single incident. If your board isn’t hearing about proactive cyber strategy regularly, that’s a red flag. Set clear expectations now, or pay a much bigger price later.
The survey is blunt on this: nearly nine in ten organizations admit they lack a truly proactive cybersecurity approach. They’re responding to incidents, but not preventing them. That’s avoidable. And for any business serious about resilience, that needs to change.
IT outages and system failures result in substantial financial losses
There’s a hard cost to insufficient IT infrastructure, and most leadership teams underestimate it until it hits their balance sheet. When systems go down, business stops. According to Unisys, more than 40% of organizations suffer losses of up to $500,000 per hour during unplanned outages. That’s not theoretical, it’s operationally disruptive and financially damaging.
The problem is tied to aging infrastructure, reactive processes, and a lack of investment in resilience. Many companies are still running core operations on systems that weren’t built to carry today’s workloads, especially those tied to AI, real-time data processing, or cloud-native services. As usage scales and dependencies increase, the cost of failure grows. And outages don’t just impact IT; they cut across customer experience, logistics, and revenue.
This isn’t about achieving perfection. No system is immune to downtime. But relying on outdated processes and legacy architecture increases both frequency and severity of failures. Resilience isn’t just a technical feature, it’s a business requirement. You need infrastructure that can handle demand surges, recover fast, and scale without fragility.
As a C-suite executive, your role isn’t to manage the systems, it’s to ensure they don’t become your weakest point. That means having clear visibility into where vulnerabilities exist, investing in smart upgrades, and holding teams accountable for uptime standards. IT resilience isn’t a back-office concern. It hits the core of business continuity, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
In the same Unisys survey, Vishal Gupta Naglapur, Senior Vice President and CTO at Unisys, called out the core issue: “The next wave of technological disruption is already underway, yet many organizations are still operating on outdated foundations and processes.” If disruptive tech is your strategy but your infrastructure belongs to a previous decade, then every outage becomes a preventable failure. Fix the foundation before you scale the future.
Key executive takeaways
- Misalignment between IT and business: Business leaders often overestimate AI progress, while IT leaders highlight infrastructure gaps. Aligning priorities across both teams is critical to avoid delays and misinformed investments.
- Infrastructure limits AI potential: Over 40% of IT leaders report that current systems can’t handle AI demands. Leaders should prioritize infrastructure upgrades before scaling AI initiatives.
- Rigid security slows innovation: Outdated cloud security frameworks are blocking data sharing and analytics. Executives should work with IT to modernize policies that balance protection with speed.
- Reactive cybersecurity is costly: Nearly 90% of firms respond to breaches but lack proactive strategies. Building forward-looking cybersecurity plans reduces risk, downtime, and damage to reputation.
- Downtime hits the bottom line: Unplanned outages cost over $500,000 per hour for 40% of companies. Leaders must invest in resilient IT systems to protect against operational and financial losses.
