Infrastructure Modernization Is Key to AI Success

Why It Matters

Modernising to cloud enables UK firms to move AI from pilot to enterprise scale, boosting productivity, innovation and competitiveness while mitigating security risks. Without this shift, the UK risks lagging in the fast‑growing global AI economy.

Summary

The United Kingdom, the world’s third‑largest AI market at £72.3 bn in 2024, faces a bottleneck as legacy systems and poor data quality impede AI adoption across sectors from construction to healthcare. Infosys EVP Umashankar Lakshmipathy argues that modern, cloud‑based infrastructure is essential to handle the massive compute, storage and real‑time data‑processing demands of today’s AI workloads. He cites research showing only 48 % of AI projects reach production and many pilots stall, while cloud platforms can break data silos, accelerate development cycles and provide robust security and disaster‑recovery features. Recent private‑cloud investments, such as Blackstone’s £10 bn AI data centre in Blyth, underscore the shift toward sovereign cloud solutions for regulated industries.