By Anirban Ghoshal
Publication Date: 2025-11-21 16:03:00
“In 2024, CIOs were largely wrestling with experimentation, high costs, lack of skills, immature data estates, and pressure to deliver quick wins from generative and agentic AI. In 2025, the challenges have shifted from ‘can we do something interesting?’ to ‘how do we run this at scale, safely, and with predictable economics?’”, said David Linthicum, independent consultant and retired chief cloud strategy officer of Deloitte Consulting.
That shift in sentiment, according to Linthicum, has widened the gap between the optimism radiating from keynote stages and the realities inside most enterprises putting vendor-driven agentic hype ahead of organizational capability.
CIOs are still grappling with uneven data quality, fragmented system landscapes, and misaligned organizational structures, all of which remain the fundamental determinants of whether agentic AI can run reliably in production, Linthicum added.
