Steve Smith, Managing Director of Americas, Digital Realty
December 10, 2024

Top CIO and IT leaders in the Americas are increasingly more involved in the overall enterprise business strategy. The leaders at the forefront understand the main drivers, and inhibitors, to company success and provide expertise in how technology can influence those outcomes.

Yet, realizing true and long-term business impact — like achieving operational efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction, and creating new products and services — requires thoughtful planning for an AI-ready IT infrastructure.

To accomplish this, these leaders rely on data for the insights that are the backbone of their strategy, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) being the key to unlocking those strategic insights.

In 2023, Digital Realty commissioned the second edition of the Global Data Insights Survey, collecting insights from 2,254 global IT decision-makers across 11 industries and 21 countries around the globe to understand how and why enterprises are rethinking data strategies at the global, regional, local, and industry level to capitalize on AI business value. Specific insights gleaned from the survey include how data and AI-readiness strategies benefit their enterprises.

Well positioned to lead globally in adoption and implementation of AI-ready IT infrastructure, IT leaders in the Americas — the U.S., Brazil, Canada, and Mexico — know this preparation requires rethinking data strategies and redesigning or integrating legacy IT infrastructures to support their AI goals, as these are the requisite precursors of AI innovation. In fact, according to The State of Data and AI in the Americas, 45% of business leaders in the Americas plan to invest in AI/ML to achieve data-driven insights.

Read on to learn how IT leaders in the Americas lead the future of data and AI-ready strategies — and are poised to continue to do so.

Americas leads the way in AI maturity and implementation

Impressively, the survey revealed 63% of IT leaders in the Americas rank themselves on the more mature side of AI adoption and utilization (ranking their organization a 4 or 5). The industries where confidence in the utilization of AI is the strongest include:

Retail – 70% 
Logistics and transportation – 65% 
Financial services – 62%

However, charting the path forward in AI adoption has its share of hurdles. Here’s how the region turns hurdles into opportunities and key considerations for IT leaders in similar pursuit.

They lean into AI for insights and innovation

IT leaders in the Americas recognize the benefits that AI brings to their enterprises and invest in AI and ML to bring those initiatives to life. Most (69%) respondents execute formal AI strategies to achieve operational efficiency or launch a business offering compared to the global average (66%). When examining countries in the region, this trend is especially prominent in Mexico and the U.S. as seen below.

Though they may be trailing behind the United States and Mexico, Brazil and Canada's IT leaders can bridge the gap by building a strong digital framework that’ll ensure sustainable data and AI success within their IT systems. They can also adopt a localized approach that will effectively allocate resources for handling AI tasks that require high-latency storage and processing.

The percentage of respondents who execute formal AI strategies to achieve operational efficiency or launch a business offering across countries:

Brazil – 59% 
Canada – 66%
Mexico – 73%
U.S. – 72%

IT leaders across the Americas also use AI to foresee risks in their enterprises with Unified Data Analytics programs. They believe the biggest value AI insights will deliver is improved customer experiences. But ultimately, they see AI as an extensive tool that can enhance every business area.

However, developing and executing formal AI strategies brings bureaucratic challenges. In fact, the survey found that while seven out of 10 (69%) IT leaders across the Americas execute a formal AI strategy, 58% say that a critical challenge is a lack of leadership knowledge or support. Without buy-in from leadership, IT leaders in the Americas will continue to face an uphill battle in adopting and implementing an AI-ready data strategy. 

They recognize the need for data and AI-ready infrastructure

IT leaders in the Americas know they need to focus on creating an AI-ready digital infrastructure foundation. One that ensures they can handle the power and energy demands to store, process, and host vast quantities of data while ensuring that performant AI workloads are located near data and users.

However, their biggest obstacle is a lack of sufficient investment in data systems, infrastructure, and analytics tools. IT leaders in the Americas know that their enterprises will only achieve AI’s full potential if they incorporate future-ready strategies for high-capacity infrastructure, storage, data proximity, and energy efficiency. 

They draft priorities to meet their data and AI objectives

What are IT leaders in the Americas doing to see a return on investment from their data and AI initiatives? They invest in data systems, infrastructure, and analytics tools. They also prioritize taking a distributed data approach and tying their data location strategy to their AI plans. 

Data centers are the key to bringing all these components together under one roof in tailored infrastructure deployments. In fact, the survey found that 46% of IT leaders in the Americas say the top requirement data center providers need to fulfill is to support their tailored infrastructure deployments, matched to business needs. Here's a look at the country-specific breakdown:

Brazil – 43%
Canada – 44%
Mexico – 45%
U.S. – 48%

When looking at trends across countries within the region, the sentiment is the same. A one-size-fits-all data center solution approach isn’t enough. IT leaders across North and South America need unique colocation and connectivity solutions coupled with expertise to best meet their enterprise data-centric goals. To enable tailored platform growth and AI-ready architecture, market-leading data center Digital Realty prioritizes these four strategic IT foundations in a data and AI-ready IT framework:

Steps IT leaders can take to create an AI-ready infrastructure

The path ahead in digital transformation means creating data-first strategies centered around data and AI readiness. To do this, IT leaders should build the data architecture to achieve business objectives, handle AI workload capacity, and increase data creation, processing, and storage without sacrificing latency. This is the blueprint for business success in the digital economy. While a true data center partner can provide enterprise-specific guidance, general tips include:

Understand the business’s main drivers and inhibitors. Today’s IT leaders in the Americas build their strategies for today and tomorrow by incorporating business goals for growth and long-term success.
Identify core areas of opportunity to impact data-driven outcomes for improvement. Partnering with the line-of-business leader is key here. Many times, that requires the IT leader to initiate those conversations and drive deeper discussions for what’s possible. Areas with high revenue or costs that have multiple data points (such as manufacturing, maintenance, and distribution) that can feed a large language model are good targets for investigation.
Target specific areas ripe for efficiency. In many cases, partnering with external providers and consultants is necessary to bring these concepts to life. More and more AI-as-a-Service providers offer consultation and AI infrastructure to help with this journey.

In broader terms, leveraging traditional IT architecture, with an eye toward the possible is a practical approach.  Given the diversity of outcomes and changing technology landscape, many enterprises seek to deploy their own infrastructure with a data center provider that can support this future variability. 

Access to AI providers, available networks, scalability, global presence, and investment in support for these ever demanding and changing workloads (such as liquid cooling and power density) are all factors to consider now, even as your AI strategy may be underway. 

Ultimately, IT leaders in the Americas must start with the vision of what’s possible, find areas that provide quick and valuable wins, and partner with the right data center to increase the likelihood of a positive impact.

Digital Realty helps Americas IT leaders create a competitive advantage in the global market

From retail to logistics and transportation to financial services, and everything in between, Digital Realty delivers the full spectrum of data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions to give your enterprise a competitive advantage. 

Get started with Digital Realty today to accelerate your data and AI-ready strategy and position yourself to lead the future of data in your industry. 

Download The State of Data and AI in the Americas to access additional insights from 600+ IT leaders across the Americas.

IT leaders in the Americas: Poised to lead the future of data and AI