Overdue Modernization Stokes Security Fears, Wrecks AI Plans
CIO Dive, Tuesday, September 29th, 2026
A GFT Technologies report finds legacy systems, modernization costs and unclear vision are holding back enterprise AI adoption.
A GFT Technologies report finds that legacy infrastructure is straining under the compute, data access and governance demands of AI and agentic systems, making interoperability with AI a main driver for modernization alongside security risk, slow releases and maintenance costs.
Only 15% of tech leaders say modernization is nearly or fully complete, while about a quarter say they have started but are behind.
GFT advises CIOs not to modernize everything at once, but to define how AI should serve the business, identify the systems blocking those goals and modernize those first.