While AI tools are proving vital for worker productivity, many enterprises are reporting serious problems with reliability - and it’s because they’ve been woefully underprepared for integrating the technology.
A new survey of backend engineers and IT decision makers by Temporal Technologies found that 94% are using AI in their workflows - mostly through tools like Copilot or ChatGPT.
However, just 39% are building reliable internal frameworks to support the adoption of the technology. A key stumbling block is the underlying infrastructure required to scale the technology at an enterprise-wide level, the study noted.
"Most teams think they’re modern. Most teams also admit they’re stuck," one respondent said. "Somewhere between post-build ('we built it!') and pre-scale ('oh god, how do we scale this thing?'), the real challenge begins."
Nearly half of large companies rely on custom-built workflow solutions, compared with just a third of smaller organizations, the survey found.
Three-quarters of teams said their workflows are hampered by issues such as insufficient support for long-running processes and high operational overhead, both cited by 35%, along with failure recovery challenges, a problem for 34%.
Reliability is more important than cost, performance, and speed, with 36% of engineering and IT leaders saying that reliability and compliance are their top development priorities over the next 12-to-24 months.
Notably, reliability and compliance are now bigger priorities than automation, cited by 33% of respondents, and reducing technical debt (30%).
Developers are getting stuck with AI tools
According to the survey, nearly a third of developers said that complex, long-running workflows break constantly, which hampers efficiency and slows down development processes.
"Everyone’s ‘using AI,’ but very few know how to keep it from falling over,” one respondent said.
“That knowledge gap isn’t just inconvenient, it’s a dealbreaker when you’re trying to scale agentic systems without a way to retry, resume, or even observe what went wrong.”
Tooling priorities and decision-making power are also misaligned, the survey found. In smaller companies, half said that developers typically lead tooling decisions, while in enterprises, that responsibility shifts to IT managers and CIOs at 53%.
For developers at larger enterprises, this means new tools and solutions are essentially dropped in their lap, and responsibility for implementation is left to them.
"The report tells us a lot of what we hear from partners every day—backend challenges aren’t just technical, they’re also organizational,” said Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal Technologies.
“Engineers and decision makers are prioritizing different things, and that disconnect is driving tooling delays, reliability risks, and rising complexity across the stack. AI is only adding another layer of scale and unpredictability.”
Security concerns are rising
Decision makers ranked security as their top concern, with nearly half saying they were losing sleep over customer churn, their biggest concern during outages.
Another 47% said that downtime drives up operational costs, while only 5% said that failures would have no major impact.
Four-in-ten respondents reported that AI’s biggest impact was in code generation - a growing trend in recent months.
A survey from Clutch revealed that 53% of senior software developers believe LLMs can already code better than most humans. However, many voiced serious concerns about data privacy and security risks.
The findings of the Clutch survey align with a previous study on the topic from Cloudsmith, which warned developers are placing too much faith in AI code generation and opening themselves up to potential security risks.
Make sure to follow ITPro on Google News to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, and reviews.
MORE FROM ITPRO
- AI coding tools are finally delivering results for enterprises
- Big tech promised developers productivity gains with AI tools – now they’re being rendered obsolete
- AI coding tools aren’t the solution to the unfolding 'developer crisis’
-
Huawei executive says 'we need to embrace AI hallucinations’News Tao Jingwen, director of Huawei’s quality, business process & IT management department, said firms should embrace hallucinations as part and parcel of generative AI.
-
Advania UK eyes further growth under new CEO James HardyNews Hardy will lead Advania’s UK business as it targets the underserved mid-market with integrated IT services
-
AI is boosting personal productivity but slowing down teams – here’s whyNews An Atlassian survey suggests AI is helping worker productivity, but a failure to collaborate means it isn't delivering ROI
-
Fiverr’s CEO told staff to upskill in AI – then cut 30% of the workforce to become an ‘AI-first’ companyNews The warning earlier this year didn't help a third of the company's workforce
-
Enterprises are concerned about ‘critical shortages’ of staff with AI ethics and security expertiseNews Tech leaders are reporting higher demand for AI literacy and “human skills”
-
Australia's biggest bank cut staff for AI, then it backtracked – and it's one of many scrapping plans for automated customer support teamsNews Think AI can manage customer service for your company? By all means, give it a go, but perhaps wait a few months before starting redundancies.
-
Lack of visibility creates "cascade" of security risk, says KiteworksNews Organizations that don't keep track of data breaches, shadow AI, and third-party counts face dramatically worse outcomes across every metric
-
Punishing workers for refusing to use AI is a terrible idea, but these CEOs did it anywayNews Justifying big money investment in AI projects has reached extreme levels in recent months, with some leaders even sacking employees who refuse to embrace the technology.
-
Public sector cyber leaders are tired of clunky, outdated toolsNews Cybersecurity practitioners in the public sector need more powerful tools to contend with a growing array of threats
-
SonicWall appoints Michael Crean to lead new Managed Security Services DivisionNews The industry and channel veteran will spearhead the security vendor’s ongoing expansion into managed security services
