Despite companies wanting to implement AI and reap the benefits of it, a majority don’t have the underlying foundations in place to make it work well.
According to CData’s latest report, The State of AI Data Connectivity: 2026 Outlook, there is a clear link between data infrastructure maturity and AI maturity.
The report found that 60% of the companies who have achieved AI maturity had invested in advanced data infrastructure, such as centralized, semantically consistent integration layers.
One hundred percent of respondents agree that access to real-time data is necessary for AI agents, but 20% still lack real-time integration capabilities.
Further, 46% of the organizations surveyed say that a single AI use case requires access to at least six different data sources. Additionally, AI-native software providers need three times more external integrations than traditional software companies.
Finally, 71% of AI teams are spending at least a quarter of their time on “data plumbing” rather than innovation.
“The era of AI being constrained by models is over. Today, AI is constrained by data,” said Amit Sharma, CEO and co-founder of CData. “The organizations winning with AI aren’t the ones with the best algorithms; they’re the ones with connected, contextual, and semantically consistent data infrastructure.”
CData surveyed over 200 data and AI leaders at software companies for its report. The full report can be downloaded here.