Organisations turn to partners to bridge the AI execution gap: Survey

Partners must offer the expertise to scale AI safely and deliver business outcomes.

Organisations are struggling to bridge the gap between AI pilots and embedded, functioning systems, according to the Logicalis Global CIO Report 2026. Increasingly, they’re looking to partners to turn ambition into outcomes.

While enthusiasm for AI is high, with 95 percent of Australian organisations keen to adopt the technology, almost 80 percent of surveyed CIOs aren’t convinced they can scale beyond pilots and 84 percent don’t have confidence AI investments have delivered measurable business value.

AI innovation is moving faster than organisations can implement the strategy, governance and data frameworks needed to manage it responsibly, said Lisa Fortey, GM, Logicalis ANZ.

To help bridge the gap, organisations need to utilise trusted partners to provide specialist capability and help reduce complexity, Fortey noted.

Skills, data and compliance limit AI progress

Lack of internal technical skills, regulatory and security compliance, organisational culture and data are the most common challenges organisations face in adopting AI, the report found.

Tom Scicluna, chief revenue officer, xAmplify, said the challenge is “organisational readiness,” which is often more complex than deploying the technology itself.

Where partners add the most value is bringing all the pieces together, aligning technology, people and processes to embed AI in operations, Scicluna said.

To do so, AI strategy needs to be aligned with the broader business plan or key performance indicators and partners have an important role to play in delivering outcomes.

“Increasingly, customers expect partners to challenge assumptions, provide strategic advice and help them make better decisions, beyond simply delivering against a predefined scope,” he said.

AI and the trust problem

Over 90 percent of Australian organisations describe their approach to AI as “learning as we go”, the report found. But this isn’t sufficient to support stable operating models that can support scale, auditability and regulatory scrutiny.

Trust remains one of the biggest barriers to scaling AI, according to Srinivas Gutta, technical practice director, Adactin.

“Organisations need confidence that their data is secure, appropriately governed and of sufficient quality to produce reliable outcomes, particularly for sensitive workloads, managed within Australia,” Gutta said.

Trusted AI services and expertise locally are critical in helping organisations overcome these concerns and move from experimentation to broader adoption and scale, Gutta noted.

Adactin is finding organisations increasingly adopting formal frameworks to manage information security, data access, governance, token consumption and monitoring of AI usage.

“This is becoming critical to building trust and giving organisations the confidence to scale AI safely and responsibly across the enterprise,” he said.

Adactin is also finding a growing customer appetite for partners to go beyond strategy and technology recommendations and take greater accountability for delivering measurable business outcomes.

“Customers value partners who can bring the right combination of AI expertise, engineering capability, governance and industry understanding to move quickly from experimentation to production,” Gutta ended.