According to Trustmarque Ultima's own AI Governance Index 2025, surveying 507 UK IT decision makers, only 4% of organisations describe their infrastructure and data environments as fully ready for AI. Not "advanced". Not "progressing well". Fully ready.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. If 96% of organisations haven't got the foundations right yet, where exactly are their AI outcomes going to land?
The answer, in most cases, is somewhere short of where they were supposed to. Not because the technology doesn't work, but because the environment it's running in was never built to carry it.
That's the conversation happening at Fusion Live 2026, on Thursday, 17 September 2026, at Magazine London. Fusion Live is Trustmarque Ultima's annual technology event, where 60+ companies come together for expert sessions and the kind of direct access to practitioners that a white paper simply cannot replicate.
The day runs across three zones, each built around our core solution areas: Productivity, Security, and AI-Ready Infrastructure. This article focuses on the AI-Ready Infrastructure, the foundations that decide whether the other two actually deliver.
Delivered by Trustmarque Ultima's Hybrid Infrastructure and Enterprise Connectivity practices, with support from our closest technology partners, the AI-Ready Infrastructure zone runs a straight line through five capabilities that most organisations treat as separate projects, and then wonder why their AI initiatives keep underperforming.
Data integrity. Workload location. Data access. Data resiliency. Workload confidence.
Each one depends on the one before it. Together, they form the difference between organisations that manage data and organisations that activate it. As Rick Ure, Trustmarque Ultima Practice Director and the architect of this zone's content, puts it:
"Everyone's chasing the AI outcome. We're here to talk about the thing nobody wants to budget for first: the floor it all stands on. Get that right and everything else gets easier. Get it wrong and you'll be explaining the shortfall, not celebrating the innovation."
Rick Ure, Trustmarque Ultima Hybrid Infrastructure Director
Here's what that gap looks like from the inside. The five pillars below aren't a preview of the day, they're the same diagnostic our specialists run against every organisation we work with. Read them against your own infrastructure and you'll have a reasonable idea of where you sit before anyone from Trustmarque Ultima says a word. If you want a second opinion once you've done that, that's what Fusion Live is for, more on that at the end.
Most organisations have data infrastructure. Far fewer have a data platform that can actually serve AI at scale, and that gap quietly caps every AI initiative before it gets going. The usual culprit: data locked away in warehouses, SaaS applications, and edge systems, treated as a constraint rather than an asset.
Our data specialists' view is that fixing this doesn't mean ripping out what's already working. It comes down to four capabilities, mobility, interoperability, timeliness, and governance, applied incrementally rather than all at once. Get the governance layer right and the impact shows up fast: in one recent case, an AI confidence score moved from 40% to 92% without touching the underlying infrastructure.
Ask yourself where your own data still lives in silos before someone else's AI project finds out for you. Our data specialists are walking through exactly how to close that gap at Fusion Live.
Learn more about how we approach AI readiness at our AI Centre of Excellence: |
The conversation in most boardrooms has moved on from "should we go to the cloud?" to "what should actually be there?" Chris Kirk, Trustmarque Ultima, Head of Cloud, Data & AI Consultancy, brings a working answer to that question from years of designing hybrid environments across public and private sector organisations.
The core argument: most organisations aren't starting from a blank slate. They have years of on-premises investment that can't, and shouldn't, be lifted into the cloud wholesale. The goal isn't cloud first or on-prem first. It's workload first, placing compute where it delivers the most value whether that's on-premises for sovereignty and cost control, or Azure for scale and managed services.
In practice, that looks like a hybrid environment where workloads move between on-prem, cloud, and edge in real time, with cost, latency, and compliance shifting as they do.
"Hybrid isn't complexity. It's control. The organisations that understand the distinction are the ones whose AI workloads actually perform."
Chris Kirk, Head of Cloud, Data & AI Consultancy
Worth knowing before you dig further: IA-Connect, Trustmarque Ultima's intelligent automation platform designed specifically for hybrid environments, is part of how Chris's team makes this practical rather than theoretical.
Cloud first or on-prem first? Wrong question. It's workload first, and Chris Kirk will show you what that looks like at Fusion Live.
More on our approach to AI Adoption & Acceleration:
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Are you confident your network could handle AI-era traffic without something breaking? If your honest answer follows what we've seen in our own research, it's likely you're not quite there yet, like most.
Most organisations have a network. Fewer have one designed around east-west data flows, real-time AI workloads, and the kind of hybrid connectivity that modern infrastructure demands. Our Enterprise Connectivity specialist Andy Want has seen the difference play out across enough client networks to know exactly what it comes down to: speed, resilience, security, and visibility, and how to move toward it without a disruptive, full-estate overhaul.
In practice, that means traffic flows shifting before and after optimisation, with AI workload priority and secure segmentation toggled in real time.
The team behind this thinking is one of the most credentialled Cisco practices in the UK. Trustmarque Ultima is the first partner globally to achieve Cisco's Customer Success Expert accreditation, part of a collaboration with Cisco that spans over 30 years and covers every major Cisco technology portfolio.
"Your network determines whether AI is theoretical or operational. That's not a metaphor. It's an architecture question."
Andrew Want, Trustmarque Ultima Enterprise Connectivity Product and Pre-Sales Director
If nobody in your organisation could answer, with confidence, whether the network survives AI-era traffic, that's worth speaking to Andrew directly at Fusion Live.
More on our connectivity practice:
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AI amplifies what your organisation can do. It also amplifies what a threat actor can do to you. Ransomware that once took days to identify now moves in minutes. Recovery expectations that once allowed for hours of downtime are now measured in seconds.
Trustmarque Ultima Presales Technical Director - Hybrid Cloud and Data, Neel Dev agrees that one of the most consistent oversights in AI adoption is governance, compliance, and data protection: usually treated as something to return to once the exciting part is done.
"Every organisation we work with has AI ambitions. Not all of them have thought carefully about what happens to those ambitions when an incident hits."
Neel Dev, Trustmarque Ultima Presales Technical Director - Hybrid Cloud and Data
To showcase the impact, he's built a simulated ransomware attack scenario, complete with AI-driven anomaly detection, automated recovery via immutable storage snapshots, and a countdown showing the downtime that didn't happen.
Worth asking your own team plainly: what's the recovery plan if the AI-driven incident happens on a Friday afternoon? Neel will be putting that scenario to the test live at Fusion Live.
The practical action: review your data resiliency and recoveryhttps://discover.trustmarque.com/data-resilience-review |
Four per cent. That's the current baseline for full AI infrastructure readiness across UK enterprise, the statistic that opened this article. What matters isn't the number itself, it's what organisations need to do to move it.
Led by James McKeown, AI Governance and Quality Assurance Specialist, from Acutest, Trustmarque Ultima's specialist software quality assurance and testing practice, will explore how governance requirements should shape infrastructure decisions. Effective AI governance goes beyond policies and frameworks. It depends on the right controls being embedded across data, AI models and cloud operations.
Get that right, and organisations gain the visibility, traceability, and control needed to govern AI effectively, reduce risk, and use AI systems with confidence, with governance requirements translated directly into infrastructure decisions rather than left as policy on a shelf.
Learn more about AI governancehttps://www.acutest.com/ai-testing-governance/ |
Four per cent of organisations call their infrastructure fully AI-ready. The other 96% are somewhere on the journey from “we think we’re fine” to “we found out the hard way.” The five specialists in this zone spend their working lives closing that gap for organisations across the UK, and Fusion Live is the one day you can put direct questions to them without a scoping call, a statement of work, or three weeks of calendar tennis.
If you’re already registered, come with your weakest pillar in mind. If you’re still deciding, that’s exactly the conversation worth having first.
Register your place here: Fusion Live 2026 | Discover Technology & Innovation | Trustmarque and Ultima
Ultima customer? Register here: Fusion Live! 2026
Or talk to us first. Want to speak to our team before the day? Book a pre-event meeting with our specialists and we'll come prepared with questions specific to your environment.
Book your pre-meeting here