How to Manage Tech Debt in the AI Era
AI is transforming business — and increasing technical debt in enterprise systems. Consider these four key insights for leaders on evaluating trade-offs and ensuring innovation capacity.
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Technical debt is an anchor, dragging down business leaders’ efforts to run a tight ship. The accumulated costs and effort from IT development shortcuts, outdated applications, and aging infrastructure sap a company’s ability to innovate, compete, and grow.
A degree of technical debt is inevitable. To remain agile, businesses often choose to deploy new technologies as quickly as possible, knowing that they may have to pay to fix their systems later. Addressing this trade-off is becoming more critical as companies adopt artificial intelligence. With over $2.41 trillion in annual costs in the United States alone, tech debt isn’t just an IT problem; it’s a business liability that requires CEOs’ attention.
Outdated infrastructure and applications aren’t just slowing companies down. Tech debt prevents organizations from deploying AI solutions that could reshape how they compete. The stark reality is that with AI poised to penetrate every business function, all technical debt is becoming AI technical debt.
In the past, experts recommended injecting a healthy dose of digital decoupling and modularity into the tech stack to address technical debt — that is, breaking code, infrastructure, and data (for example) into smaller, interchangeable parts that could be replaced more easily when better technology emerged.
To understand how today’s business leaders are reinventing their organizations, including the role tech debt plays, Accenture studied 1,500 global companies in 10 countries covering 19 industries and conducted scores of in-depth discussions with C-level leaders. The research found that companies that are well positioned for change have a reinvention-ready “digital core” — a set of key components such as cloud infrastructure, data, and AI that can be easily updated. They also typically set aside around 15% of their IT budgets for tech debt remediation.
Companies that are well-positioned for change typically set aside around 15% of their IT budgets for tech debt remediation.
What the research made clear is that today, addressing tech debt is not about eliminating it but managing it. The key lies in knowing what the debt is, what to fix, what to keep, and how to recognize the tech debt that is boosting your company’s innovation capacity.
