Rebecca PY MALAYSIA, 25 JUNE 2026 – Healthcare organisations worldwide are accelerating their adoption of artificial intelligence at a pace that is outstripping their infrastructure readiness, creating serious risks for clinical continuity, data governance, and patient outcomes. That is the central warning from Nutanix’s 2026 Healthcare Enterprise Cloud Index, the eighth annual edition of the company’s flagship infrastructure survey, this time focused exclusively on the healthcare sector.
The report, drawn from responses by 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives across 14 countries, paints a sector caught between boardroom ambition and ground-level unpreparedness. AI deployment is increasingly being driven from the top, but the organisational and technical foundations to support it safely, particularly at the point of care, remain critically underdeveloped.
Perhaps the most alarming finding concerns shadow AI. Seventy-nine percent of healthcare organisations report encountering AI applications or agents being deployed by employees outside of IT functions, and 83% acknowledge that such unmanaged tools create meaningful business risk. The same proportion identify silos between business units and IT as a key barrier to effective technology execution, a structural problem that deepens as AI adoption scales.
The infrastructure gap is equally stark. Eighty-eight percent of healthcare IT leaders say their current infrastructure is not fully ready to support on-premises AI workloads, a critical shortfall given the growing consensus that AI inference at the point of care, rather than via cloud-only processing, is essential to avoiding latency risks in clinical environments. The scale of the data challenge is significant: a single patient room can generate up to 7TB of data annually, while high-density settings such as ICU beds may involve 15 to 20 connected devices, all requiring local, low-latency processing to maintain clinical continuity.
Containers are emerging as a key part of the solution. Eighty-six percent of healthcare organisations say AI is meaningfully accelerating their adoption of containerisation, which allows AI models to be deployed locally at the bedside in secure, portable environments. Eighty percent are already building new applications in containers, and 81% expect containerisation levels to increase further.
The potential of AI agents is not lost on healthcare leaders either. Fifty-eight percent expect AI agents to improve productivity and efficiency, 57% believe they will transform business processes, and more than half see potential for agents to generate new products, services, or revenue streams. Looking three years ahead, 57% of organisations anticipate deploying agentic or autonomous AI.
Data sovereignty is another non-negotiable priority. Seventy-two percent of respondents classify it as a high priority or must-include consideration in infrastructure decisions, reflecting the sensitivity of protected health information and the compliance requirements governing where such data can be stored and processed.
Daryush Ashjari, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Solution Engineering for APJ at Nutanix, stressed that the pressure healthcare organisations face extends well beyond IT departments. He noted that when infrastructure readiness lags behind clinical AI demand, the consequences can affect the availability of critical systems, access to vital data, and ultimately the continuity of patient care itself.
The report’s conclusion is direct: healthcare organisations are accelerating into AI without the infrastructure to support it safely, and closing that gap requires a fundamental rethink of how healthcare IT is architected, governed, and scaled from the data centre all the way to the bedside.