TL;DR:
Fragmented AI instruments are draining budgets, slowing adoption, and irritating groups. To regulate prices and speed up ROI, AI leaders want interoperable options that cut back instrument sprawl and streamline workflows.
AI funding is underneath a microscope in 2025. Leaders aren’t simply requested to show AI’s worth — they’re being requested why, after vital investments, their groups nonetheless battle to ship outcomes.
1-in-4 groups report issue implementing AI instruments, and almost 30% cite integration and workflow inefficiencies as their prime frustration, in keeping with our Unmet AI Needs report.
The offender? A disconnected AI ecosystem. When groups spend extra time wrestling with disconnected instruments than delivering outcomes, AI leaders danger ballooning prices, stalled ROI, and excessive expertise turnover.
AI practitioners spend extra time sustaining instruments than fixing enterprise issues. The largest blockers? Guide pipelines, instrument fragmentation, and connectivity roadblocks.
Think about if cooking a single dish required utilizing a distinct range each single time. Now envision working a restaurant underneath these circumstances. Scaling can be inconceivable.
Equally, AI practitioners are slowed down by the time-consuming, brittle pipelines, leaving much less time to advance and ship AI options.
AI integration should accommodate various working kinds, whether or not code-first in notebooks, GUI-driven, or a hybrid method. It should additionally bridge gaps between groups, equivalent to information science and DevOps, the place every group depends on totally different toolsets. When these workflows stay siloed, collaboration slows, and deployment bottlenecks emerge.
Scalable AI additionally calls for deployment flexibility equivalent to JAR information, scoring code, APIs or embedded purposes. With out an infrastructure that streamlines these workflows, AI leaders danger stalled innovation, rising inefficiencies, and unrealized AI potential.
How integration gaps drain AI budgets and assets
Interoperability hurdles don’t simply decelerate groups – they create vital price implications.
The highest workflow restrictions AI practitioners face:
- Guide pipelines. Tedious setup and upkeep pull AI, engineering, DevOps, and IT groups away from innovation and new AI deployments.
- Device and infrastructure fragmentation. Disconnected environments create bottlenecks and inference latency, forcing groups into infinite troubleshooting as an alternative of scaling AI.
- Orchestration complexities. Guide provisioning of compute assets — configuring servers, DevOps settings, and adjusting as utilization scales — just isn’t solely time-consuming however almost inconceivable to optimize manually. This results in efficiency limitations, wasted effort, and underutilized compute, in the end stopping AI from scaling successfully.
- Tough updates. Fragile pipelines and gear silos make integrating new applied sciences sluggish, complicated, and unreliable.
The long-term price? Heavy infrastructure administration overhead that eats into ROI.
Extra price range goes towards the overhead prices of guide patchwork options as an alternative of delivering outcomes.
Over time, these course of breakdowns lock organizations into outdated infrastructure, frustrate AI groups, and stall enterprise affect.
Code-first builders desire customization, however know-how misalignment makes it more durable to work effectively.
- 42% of builders say customization improves AI workflows.
- Just one-in-3 say their AI instruments are straightforward to make use of.
This disconnect forces groups to decide on between flexibility and value, resulting in misalignments that sluggish AI improvement and complicate workflows. However these inefficiencies don’t cease with builders. AI integration points have a much wider affect on the enterprise.
The true price of integration bottlenecks
Disjointed AI instruments and techniques don’t simply affect budgets; they create ripple results that affect staff stability and operations.
- The human price. With a median tenure of simply 11 months, information scientists typically depart earlier than organizations can totally profit from their experience. Irritating workflows and disconnected instruments contribute to excessive turnover.
- Misplaced collaboration alternatives. Solely 26% of AI practitioners really feel assured counting on their very own experience, making cross-functional collaboration important for knowledge-sharing and retention.
Siloed infrastructure slows AI adoption. Leaders typically flip to hyperscalers for price financial savings, however these options don’t at all times combine simply with instruments, including backend friction for AI groups.
Generative AI and agentic are including extra complexity
With 90% of respondents anticipating generative AI and predictive AI to converge, AI groups should stability person wants with technical feasibility.
As King’s Hawaiian CDAO Ray Fager explains:
“Utilizing generative AI in tandem with predictive AI has actually helped us construct belief. Enterprise customers ‘get’ generative AI since they will simply work together with it. Once they have a GenAI app that helps them work together with predictive AI, it’s a lot simpler to construct a shared understanding.”
With an rising demand for generative and agentic AI, practitioners face mounting compute, scalability, and operational challenges. Many organizations are layering new generative AI instruments on prime of their current know-how stack with no clear integration and orchestration technique.
The addition of generative and agentic AI, with out the inspiration to effectively allocate these complicated workloads throughout all accessible compute assets, will increase operational pressure and makes AI even more durable to scale.
4 steps to simplify AI infrastructure and minimize prices
Streamlining AI operations doesn’t must be overwhelming. Listed below are actionable steps AI leaders can take to optimize operations and empower their groups:
Step 1: Assess instrument flexibility and adaptableness
Agentic AI requires modular, interoperable instruments that assist frictionless upgrades and integrations. As necessities evolve, AI workflows ought to stay versatile, not constrained by vendor lock-in or inflexible instruments and architectures.
Two necessary inquiries to ask are:
- Can AI groups simply join, handle, and interchange instruments equivalent to LLMs, vector databases, or orchestration and safety layers with out downtime or main reengineering?
- Do our AI instruments scale throughout numerous environments (on-prem, cloud, hybrid), or are they locked into particular distributors and inflexible infrastructure?
Step 2: Leverage a hybrid interface
53% of practitioners desire a hybrid AI interface that blends the flexibleness of coding with the accessibility of GUI-based instruments. As one information science lead defined, “GUI is crucial for explainability, particularly for constructing belief between technical and non-technical stakeholders.”
Step 3: Streamline workflows with AI platforms
Consolidating instruments into a unified platform reduces guide pipeline stitching, eliminates blockers, and improves scalability. A platform method additionally optimizes AI workflow orchestration by leveraging one of the best accessible compute assets, minimizing infrastructure overhead whereas guaranteeing low-latency, high-performance AI options.
Step 4: Foster cross-functional collaboration
When IT, information science, and enterprise groups align early, they will establish workflow boundaries earlier than they turn out to be implementation roadblocks. Utilizing unified instruments and shared techniques reduces redundancy, automates processes, and accelerates AI adoption.
Set the stage for future AI innovation
The Unmet AI Wants survey makes one factor clear: AI leaders should prioritize adaptable, interoperable instruments — or danger falling behind.
Inflexible, siloed techniques not solely slows innovation and delays ROI, it additionally prevents organizations from responding to fast-moving developments in AI and enterprise know-how.
With 77% of organizations already experimenting with generative and predictive AI, unresolved integration challenges will solely turn out to be extra pricey over time.
Leaders who tackle instrument sprawl and infrastructure inefficiencies now will decrease operational prices, optimize assets, and see stronger long-term AI returns
Get the complete DataRobot Unmet AI Needs report to find out how prime AI groups are overcoming implementation hurdles and optimizing their AI investments.
