A study by consulting firm CGI, called "Voice of Our Clients", reveals that technological and digital acceleration is the macro-trend with the greatest impact for 70% of global managers, although companies' readiness still falls short of the speed of artificial intelligence adoption. The report is based on independent interviews with more than 1,800 executives from business and technology areas, identifying a clear market shift towards engineering and digital re-engineering to enable and expand the use of AI.
The study identifies three major macroeconomic and technological trends. The first highlights the urgency of building adaptable and resilient organizations in the face of geopolitical tensions and the reconfiguration of supply chains, with 52% of leaders prioritizing data sovereignty and local cloud strategies, but only 25% classifying their operational models as highly agile. The second trend shows that ambition in AI adoption is exceeding organizations' structural maturity, with Generative AI implementation jumping 30 percentage points in the last two years, already being applied to operational processes in 62% of companies, although only 40% have a structured enterprise strategy for this technology.
The third vector indicates that organizations' progress is constrained by talent shortages and financial limitations. Cost pressure leads the obstacles to transformation, aggravated by the fact that 45% of executives consider legacy IT systems a barrier to data strategies, and 52% acknowledge that the shortage of IT professionals has a significant impact on their projects' execution capacity. Carlos Lourenço, senior vice-president of CGI in Portugal, pointed out that investment in AI in the country continues to grow driven by companies and by national and European initiatives, arguing that national organizations need to modernize their platforms, data foundations and operational models to convert investment into real value.
Faced with increasing operational complexity, the report concludes that global clients are reducing the number of vendors, favoring integrated trust-based partnerships and increasingly resorting to selective managed service models to overcome internal skills deficits. The Canadian consulting firm took advantage of the study's release, which coincides with the company's 50th anniversary since its founding in 1976, to recall the creation of an AI Center of Excellence in Portugal, an infrastructure aimed at accelerating technological transition in the local market.
