A new report from Cockroach Labs reveals a growing concern that AI use is starting to overwhelm the traditional IT systems meant to support it.
The study, conducted by Wakefield Research among over 1,100 senior cloud architects, engineers, and technology executives, shows that as AI moves into to always-on production systems, leaders expect a widening gap between AI ambition and infrastructure readiness, intensifying the call to rethink architecture for continuous, machine-driven scale.
The findings show 83 percent of leaders believe AI-driven demand will cause their data infrastructure to fail without major upgrades within the next 24 months, and 34 percent expect failure within the next 11 months. For many enterprises, infrastructure failure related to AI scale is no longer a distant risk — it’s viewed as imminent.
“What the data shows is that AI doesn’t just add load — it changes the scale systems have to survive,” says Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. “Leaders aren’t worried about whether AI works. They’re worried their infrastructure won’t hold up once AI is always on. At that point, resilience isn’t about recovery — it’s about whether the architecture can handle continuous success without breaking.”
Among other findings, 100 percent of respondents expect AI workloads to grow in the next year, with more than 60 percent predicting increases of 20 percent or more. AI-related reliability issues are no longer hypothetical either, 77 percent expect AI to drive at least 10 percent of all service disruptions in the year ahead.
The database layer is emerging as a critical point of failure. 30 percent of respondents identify the database as the first point of failure in an AI-overload scenario, second only to the cloud infrastructure (36 percent) itself.
The survey shows organizations understand the benefits AI can deliver: 99.6 percent of companies are prioritizing investment in improving AI scalability and database performance in the next year. However, nearly 63 percent of respondents say their leadership teams underestimate how quickly AI demands will outpace existing data infrastructure.
You can get the full report from the Cockroach site.
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