THINK LIKE THE TOP 10% Leaders have a deliberate stance toward technology adoption and a clear vision for what their companies’ future systems should look like. Leaders have directed a greater percentage of their IT budget toward innovation over the past five years and expect to accelerate investment in innovation faster than Laggards over the next five. (See Figure 3) While technology adoption is pervasive among all the companies surveyed, Leaders show a consistently higher rate than others. (See Figure 7) They tend to adopt new technologies earlier, develop higher levels of expertise, and prioritize and sequence implementations in optimal ways. In doing so, they create systems rather than point technology solutions. For example, Leaders adopt AI, a fundamental general-purpose technology, at a rate of 98%. And even more revealing, before implementing AI, Leaders set up complementary technologies such as data lakes (a system or repository of data stored in its raw format) and cloud services (any service made available to users on demand via a cloud computing provider’s servers). Laggards, on the other hand, have faith in a “fast follower” approach, taking on technology somewhat haphazardly leading to a patchwork across the organization. Only 42% of Laggards have implemented AI, for instance. Often following fads, they put in place technologies as individual point solutions without a vision for how technologies will complement each other, and without a plan for cultivating enterprise systems. As a result, when a potentially game-changing innovation comes along, they cannot effectively scale it. Future Systems 11