BLUE BELL, PA — Businesses are building stronger AI and cloud infrastructure without generating comparable operating gains, according to a Unisys Corp. survey of 1,000 senior technology and business executives across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
The report found that 90% of respondents believe their organizations have the architecture needed for large-scale, data-driven decision-making, up from 72% in 2025. An equal share reported effectively using automation to optimize their technology environments.
Yet only 65% said operational efficiency exceeded expectations, down from 80% a year earlier, exposing a widening gap between technical readiness and measurable business performance.
The findings are based on executives’ assessments of their own organizations. Unisys (NYSE: UIS) did not provide details on respondents’ industries, company sizes, geographic distribution or the survey’s margin of error.
Companies continue to prioritize technical objectives over direct commercial results. Respondents ranked technology modernization and enabling AI and automation as their leading application-transformation goals, cited by 39% and 36%, respectively.
Those objectives ranked above reducing operating costs at 27%, improving customer experience at 24% and accelerating speed to market at 21%.
Fewer than half of the business executives surveyed, 42%, viewed cloud and information technology operations as profit centers rather than costs.
“IT and business leaders must show that their investments are paying off and delivering real growth,” Unisys Chief Executive Officer and President Mike Thomson said. He urged companies to link technology spending more directly to business outcomes and deploy autonomous AI tools where they can create measurable value.
Talent shortages were cited by 27% of respondents as a barrier to scaling new technology, while 26% identified data management and integration problems.
Interest in agentic AI — systems designed to complete tasks and make decisions with limited human intervention — remains well ahead of deployment.
Three-quarters of respondents said the technology will be essential to managing cloud environments, but only 23% reported that their organizations had begun scaling it across the business.
Despite limited deployment, 89% said they had identified priority uses for agentic AI. More than 80% also reported progress in employee training, executive support and partnerships with technology vendors.
Cybersecurity concerns rose sharply in the survey. Forty-nine percent of respondents reported experiencing a breach during the previous 12 months, compared with 17% in the prior-year study.
The survey did not specify the severity of the incidents, how a breach was defined or whether the increase reflected changes in attack frequency, detection practices or the respondent sample.
Security policies are also shaping how much authority organizations give AI systems. Ninety-three percent of respondents said cloud-security capabilities significantly influence the autonomy granted to AI tools.
At the same time, 96% described security as helping their organizations adopt new technology faster than competitors, up from 60% in 2025.
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