Why most clouds are not AI-ready, and three paths to fix it
Data gravity, governance debt and platform fragmentation are quietly capping AI ROI. A pragmatic framework for getting to an AI-ready cloud in 12 months.
Your cloud may scale workloads but still block AI.
Most enterprise cloud estates were built for app migration, not high-trust data movement. When AI teams arrive, they inherit disconnected accounts, unclear ownership, and governance processes that cannot keep pace with experimentation.
Stabilise the platform contract.
Define the golden paths that teams can use without a ticket queue: identity, data access, observability, model endpoints, and deployment environments. The contract should be opinionated enough to reduce variance and flexible enough for product teams to ship.
Move governance into the pipeline.
Policy-as-code, automated evidence capture, and evaluation gates make AI governance inspectable. Review boards still matter, but they should be reviewing real telemetry instead of slideware.
