Legacy Systems Cost $3 Million to Maintain; Gen AI to the Rescue?

New research from generative integration company SnapLogic finds that legacy technologies cost most businesses $3 million on average to maintain, a cost burdening organizations with significant debt.

SnapLogic surveyed 750 IT decision-makers overseeing companies with more than 250 employees. The company found that most organizations (65%) spent more than $2 million maintaining or upgrading their older systems. That's more than double the percentage of respondents five years ago.

Might generative AI answer some of this problem? Nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers in the survey said they expect gen AI tools to free up more than 25% of their existing workloads.

SnapLogic's Jeremiah Stone

“Legacy technology is one of the main inhibitors to the adoption of gen AI technology due to data isolation and incompatibility with modern API-centric AI systems,” said Jeremiah Stone, CTO of SnapLogic. “Overcoming this gap is critical to success and is consistent with what I have been hearing, firsthand, from CIOs and IT leaders across a variety of different industries.

Not surprising in the survey's results, more business executives are deploying generative integration − in which SnapLogic specializes − and "innovative measures... to navigate such challenges and deliver on gen AI initiatives to gain competitive advantage," said Stone. "Ultimately, the race to resolve legacy tech, in order to onboard gen AI, is well underway. It’s now just a question of who will reap the rewards soonest.”

The majority of IT executives (63%) in the survey reported experiencing a "moderate" to "severe" negative impact of technical debt.

IT decision-makers also reported (69%) that they were using more than 10 different tools for work. Nearly all of the respondents (86%) said that having many tools led to them losing more than five hours of productivity a week due to constant switching.