The Paradoxes of Progress
in IT Service Providers
Find out how IT leaders at UK service providers are balancing AI growth, regulatory pressure, resilience planning, and ESG expectations.
The pressures behind modern service provider infrastructure
Service providers are being pulled in multiple directions. AI is ramping up demand for compute and power, regulation is evolving across borders, and global instability is reshaping decisions about risk and location.
To understand how leaders are responding, we surveyed 500 UK-based IT decision-makers from enterprise service providers. Our new report, The Paradoxes of Progress in IT Service Providers, explores the trade-offs, day-to-day decisions, and infrastructure approaches providers are using to stay in control as complexity increases.
This report answers questions like:
- How are service providers scaling AI while managing rising power demand and ESG reporting expectations?
- Which regulatory requirements and approval processes most often delay technology rollouts, especially across borders?
- How quickly can AI inference workloads fail over if a primary UK AI data centre is taken offline?
What's inside the report?
The report breaks the challenge into three competing paradoxes.
- AI acceleration vs. ESG proof: How AI is supporting ESG goals – and why proving the impact is difficult in practice.
- Regulation support vs. Delivery drag: How UK and cross-border regulation affects timelines, confidence, and depolyment strategy.
- Geopolitical shocks vs. Always-on resilience: How risk is shaping infrastructure decisions – and where recovery readiness still lags.
Download the Report
AI acceleration vs ESG proof
AI now underpins how IT service providers optimise operations and forecast performance, but rising energy demand and inconsistent measurement make sustainability gains harder to evidence.
Key findings:
96%
96% of IT decision-makers at service providers believe AI is accelerating their ability to achieve net zero and wider ESG targets.
50%
50% say they struggle to measure the emissions of AI workloads accurately.
Regulation support vs delivery drag
Providers broadly support the UK’s more flexible approach to AI and data regulation, but approval cycles, cross-border inconsistency and divergence from the EU’s AI Act are testing delivery confidence.
Key findings:
67%
67% say current data protection rules act as an accelerator to launching new digital services.
34%
34% report that regulatory approvals delay rollouts on most or almost every project.
Geopolitical shocks vs always-on resilience
Geopolitical volatility is reshaping capacity, energy risk, and data residency decisions for IT decision-makers at service providers, but recovery speeds still lag behind customer expectations.
Key findings:
96%
say geopolitical risks are affecting their organisation’s infrastructure decisions.
53%
say it would take over an hour to switch inference workloads if a regional incident took their primary UK AI data centre offline.