Authored by Tharun Mathew. Featured in CIOReview Europe.
Most agentic AI programmes fail before the model ever gets chosen. They fail at the infrastructure question nobody asked first.
This article makes the case that generative AI was a forgiving guest: a chatbot could tolerate a messy schema or a stale table because a human sanity-checked the answer before acting on it. Agentic AI removes that buffer. It reads, reasons and acts on its own, so weak data structure, loose permissioning or stale state stop being minor flaws and start becoming real operational risk.
With 94% of IT leaders naming modernisation a top AI priority but only 32% of application portfolios considered AI ready, the gap is substantial. The piece lays out a five-step blueprint modernisation-ready CIOs are using to close it: audit before migrating, fix the data layer before the agent layer, build governance in from the start, phase rollout around high-value workloads, and design for reuse. It closes with the real question CIOs should be asking: not which agents to deploy first, but whether the infrastructure underneath them was ever built to hold one.
Read the full article here: https://www.ciorevieweurope.com/leadership-perspective/tharun-mathew-nwid-2108.html
