What infrastructure challenges are organisations facing as they scale AI?
Leon Butler, IBM: Complexity is a major one. If you look at the average enterprise, you’ ve got over a thousand applications. When you’ re building AI applications across on-premise, private cloud and multiple public clouds, that becomes a real challenge to deal with.
Energy is another one. AI is very energy-intensive, and that’ s a real conversation we need to have.
From an agentic perspective, there’ s a risk at the moment: you’ ve got agents all over the place. Agents are uncoordinated, not talking to each other. The ability to evaluate what agents are doing, especially when they can access multiple applications, is going to be really important.
Sue Daley OBE, techUK: This connects back to skills as well. Someone said to me recently that this will be the last generation that only manages humans. The next generation will be managing both humans and AI agents. So what does that mean for the management skills we’ re teaching people in workplaces right now? What does that look like for people entering the workforce? I think that’ s a fascinating area, but we haven’ t yet figured out the answers.
166 January 2026