Two cohorts are forming in APAC. Only one is compounding.
IDC's new research, sponsored by MongoDB, surveyed 1,400 APAC IT leaders and found two cohorts pulling apart: Leaders who modernize their core systems first, and the mainstream who stay constrained by legacy infrastructure.
The barrier isn’t the AI model. It’s the data foundation. When transactional records, customer profiles, claims data, or unstructured documents live in separate systems, every AI initiative starts with an integration project instead of a business outcome. According to the report, 89% of APAC organizations say technical debt is a major obstacle to modernization; 34% haven’t even started. And IDC predicts CIOs who don’t address their data debt will face a 50% higher AI failure rate.
The economics of legacy data are daunting. The more fragile the system, the more you spend maintaining it. The more you spend on maintenance, the less you invest in transformative capabilities: AI-driven fraud detection, hyper-personalized banking experiences, or predictive analytics for claims processes. That’s the difference between data as a maintenance cost and data as a competitive asset.
