The rapid rise of AI adoption in the enterprise over the last year is forcing a wave of infrastructure modernisation, as companies race to build and run applications more efficiently, according to Nutanix.
For the eighth consecutive year, Nutanix commissioned a global research study to assess the state of cloud adoption, containerisation, and GenAI application deployment.
Conducted in November 2025 by Wakefield Research, the survey gathered responses from 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives with at least a manager-level title.
Respondents represent organisations with 500 or more employees across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Findings show that containers have become a core component of the enterprise application strategy with 90% of Australian respondents confirming AI is accelerating their adoption of containers to improve speed, reliability, and scalability.
“It is clear Australian organisations are ready to embrace AI, but this requires resilient, dependable, and well-governed infrastructure. Containerisation has emerged as a fundamental pillar in local AI and application strategies, but broader adoption requires a reimagining of the underlying infrastructure,” said Michael Alp, managing director for A/NZ at Nutanix.
“Rather than manage a two-speed infrastructure stack, a common operating environment to manage both containerised and traditional workloads would address key concerns like shadow IT and data sovereignty,” said Alp.
Results also show that shadow IT is creating AI challenges and security concerns with 72% of respondents encountering AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions.
Also, 92% of Australian leaders believe unauthorised AI use introduces risk, including exposure of sensitive data and intellectual property. This highlights the need for closer collaboration between IT teams and business stakeholders to ensure AI deployments remain secure, compliant, and aligned with organisational goals.
In addition, organisational silos create new AI risks. While AI adoption is driving innovation, it is also introducing operational challenges. Among Australian respondents, 84% believe silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, slowing deployment timelines and increasing complexity.
Further, agents unlock enormous potential with organisations. Most Australian IT executives (70%) also anticipate that AI agents will improve productivity and efficiency. Three in every five (62%) expect AI agents to enhance customer or employee experiences.
Additionally, some believe that AI agents can play a deeper role, with 58% seeing potential for AI agents to create new products, services, or revenue streams.
Findings also show that data sovereignty is non-negotiable. For 89% of Australian respondents, data sovereignty is a high priority when making infrastructure decisions — including where to utilise containers. This is in comparison to 80% worldwide.
More than half (60%) of Australian leaders feel the need to run their infrastructure domestically, whether on-premises or through a local cloud region, largely due to security or data protection concerns.
Moreover, containers are the foundation of modern applications, with AI as the key driver. Organisations are turning to containers to support AI-enabled workloads and modern application development. Among respondents, 85% expect the use of containers for applications to increase over the next three years, while 66% say they are already building new and legacy applications in containers.
Nine in 10 respondents believe AI is accelerating container adoption which highlights why enterprises need to evolve their infrastructure strategies to handle containerised workloads.
Also, the directive to deploy AI applications comes from the top, but infrastructure is not ready to fully support it. Almost half (48%) of respondents anticipate that their organisation will have more than five AI-enabled applications in the next three years.
Yet, if their organisation needed to deploy AI workloads on-premises, 87% believe their current infrastructure is not fully ready to support this.
