AI tooling sprawl continues to bedevil organizations

Large and in charge—for enterprises, that’s a sign of the times, and could lead to problems.

AI tool sprawl is increasingly presenting challenges for organizations as they manage the changing tech landscape. For companies investing in growth areas while trying to keep costs down, that often means looking for the most efficient solution in the short term, said Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer at Nile. And often it also means adding other tools to the tech stack, which makes things more difficult.

“If you look at the traditional enterprise companies, there’s a lot of accumulated technology and technical debt because they’ve got this infrastructure that’s spread out across potentially different cities, countries, globally, and they have mergers and acquisitions,” Kiran said. “There is a technology stack that builds up to a bit of a Frankenstein stack, which can make it very difficult for them to move quickly, have compliance, figure out where issues are, and all of that stuff.”

Difficulty ahead. Sprawl isn’t the only issue facing enterprises that want to integrate AI into the tech stack. Many organizations are trying to balance on-prem and cloud solutions to their AI challenges, which could lead to more efficiencies—or more chaos.

“Any time automation comes in, machine to machine, you’re getting efficiencies, you’re going to be making things more productive,” Anil Nanduri, Intel’s VP of AI product management, told IT Brew.

But the unchecked expansion of tooling solutions remains a key concern—and one that, as payments software company Zuora SVP and CIO Karthik Chakkarapani told IT Brew in April, shouldn’t be such a challenge for a technology that’s supposed to streamline processes.

“We shouldn’t end up in an AI sprawl. It is a key lesson. We don’t want to be having 1,000 agents now and less SaaS apps,” Chakkarapani said. “We need to make sure your work is orchestrated in the right way, where there is less friction, better experience, and it’s also intent-driven work—nobody has to navigate to multiple applications and multiple agents.”

Checking in. From the IT pro perspective, it’s important to frame the shift to AI—and the warnings about sprawl—culturally for employees. Luckily, as Kiran put it, there are “several triggers and enforcing functions that are happening very organically today” related to the adoption of AI. Those triggers are the human element versus AI solutions in the tech stack, rehiring and reprofiling workers in a new technological landscape, and cost of change, all of which are changing how enterprises are managing the technological shift.

“We are seeing this trifecta of triggers, which I would call tailwinds, that are happening, and they’re all eventually looking at, ‘How can [AI] help me propel faster?’” Kiran said.