Only 8% of Enterprises Say Their Data Is Production-Ready: Report
Overall, 76% of respondents ranked data quality and trust among their top three barriers to putting AI agents into production.
Only 8.4% of organisations say the data feeding their AI systems is trustworthy enough for production, even as more than half are already experimenting with or deploying AI agents, highlighting a widening gap between enterprise AI adoption and the readiness of the data infrastructure supporting it.
The findings come from The Modern Data Company’s latest Modern Data Report: 5 Emerging Trends in Enterprise Data & AI, based on more than 540 responses from data leaders and practitioners across 65-plus countries.
The Left Shift Bureau
The survey found that 57.3% of organisations are piloting AI agents or already using them in production, while data quality and trust have emerged as the biggest obstacles to moving these systems further into business operations.
Overall, 76% of respondents ranked data quality and trust among their top three barriers to putting AI agents into production. The challenge is particularly significant as agents increasingly interact with enterprise systems, workflows and data rather than simply generating responses.
“Based on our research, data quality and trust now rank among the biggest barriers to putting AI agents into production, while governance has to extend to how AI uses enterprise data and acts on it. As AI takes on a more active role in business workflows, organisations need to build the context, controls and accountability that allow these systems to operate with confidence,” said Saurabh Gupta, The Modern Data Company President & CEO.
Business context is emerging as another critical piece of the AI foundation. 61% of respondents said a reliable context layer is critical or very important for AI agents, but only 16% said their organisations deliberately engineer the context layer as a product.
The report also found that 47% of organisations are actively consolidating towards fewer data platforms, while another 17% are evaluating consolidation. Meanwhile, 46% said more than a quarter of their teams’ time is spent maintaining or integrating tools.
The Left Shift Bureau
Governance remains another major concern, with 62% ranking security and governance among their top three barriers to production AI. Only 18% said they have a clear, documented AI accountability framework.
Organisations already running AI agents in production were 3.6 times more likely to have deliberately engineered their context layer and three times more likely to report confidence in their AI data than organisations that were interested in agents but had not yet started.
“For Indian businesses, the next phase of AI adoption will be about turning AI capability into measurable business outcomes. That requires organisations to build trusted data and business context into the AI foundation from the start,” added Sanjoy Roy, The Modern Data Company VP, APAC, Middle East & EU.
The Left Shift Bureau
The Left Shift Bureau
The Left Shift Bureau
