GenAI adoption 2026: Challenges with enterprise data

Since our 2024 survey, enterprise GenAI adoption has rapidly matured - from widespread experimentation to real production momentum. While only 2% of organizations had deployed GenAI use cases to production in 2024, 45% now plan to deploy or scale production initiatives in 2026, signaling a decisive shift from pilots to enterprise-wide execution.

As organizations move GenAI and Agentic AI into production, data has emerged as the biggest barrier to success. In our latest survey, 76% cite building effective guardrails for responsible AI use as a top challenge, while 62% struggle with achieving enterprise data readiness - highlighting that production success depends less on models and more on trusted, governed data foundations.

Data remains the core barrier to AI-ready enterprises. Organizations cite data quality and consistency (59%), fragmented systems (50%), and security and privacy concerns (50%) as their biggest challenges - along with limited real-time data access (33%) - highlighting the limits of legacy data architectures for production GenAI.