British boards are pouring money into AI faster than they can prove it works, and new IDC research commissioned by Expereo points to an unglamorous reason why so many projects disappoint: the network carrying the workload. The InfoBrief, drawn from UK technology leaders at the country's largest enterprises, found that two thirds of organisations are investing in AI on the strength of its potential rather than measured returns. Nearly one in six admit they are spending aggressively with little evaluation, driven by a fear of being left behind.
That appetite has made AI the headline priority. Asked where they will direct effort and money over the next twelve months, 55 percent of UK organisations named AI or machine learning. The returns have not kept pace. Only 15 percent say their AI implementations have exceeded expectations, and a mere 3 percent report exceeding them significantly. When asked why projects fall short, 48 percent cite inadequate or poor-quality training data, 45 percent point to costs running higher than planned or ROI never arriving, and 42 percent say the technology simply did not perform as hoped.
Less widely discussed is the infrastructure sitting beneath all of it. Almost a quarter of UK businesses, 24 percent, named inadequate network or connectivity performance as a reason their AI fell short. Looking forward, 54 percent say they need more flexible and scalable networks to make AI work, and 57 percent want greater resilience and reliability to protect uptime. The figures reframe a problem usually filed under data science as one of plumbing.
Every UK organisation we speak to is investing in AI, yet the data shows a clear gap opening up between AI ambition and AI outcomes. More often than not, that gap comes down to the network underneath. AI only delivers on its promise when the infrastructure carrying it is built to support it.
The survey also captures a board-level wariness about what comes next. More than half of UK technology leaders, 56 percent, flag new security risks as a significant future threat tied to their use of AI, and a third worry about losing sight of AI-related costs and ROI once the technology is embedded across the business. The pattern across the research is consistent. The ambition is real, the spending is committed, and the infrastructure decisions that determine whether any of it pays off are only now reaching the boardroom.
