// Insights Latest from
Vertex Agility

May 13, 2026

The Data-First Reversal: Why 2026 Is the Year Cloud-First Strategies Hit the Wall

A techUK report has confirmed what CIOs have felt in their cost reviews for two years: cloud-first strategies are hitting sovereignty and cost walls. This article examines the egress tax problem, the implications of the UK Data Use and Access Act 2025, and what a genuine data-first architecture – one where compute moves to data, not the other way around – actually requires organisations to do differently.

May 6, 2026

You’re Budgeting for Infinite AI Compute. The Grid Has Other Plans.

AI data centres are projected to consume more energy than Germany and France combined by 2030, yet most enterprise AI strategies are still built on the assumption that compute is cheap and limitless. This article examines the energy and infrastructure constraints that are closing the brute-force compute era, and sets out the practical architecture shifts – task decomposition, context discipline, evaluation-driven model selection – that organisations need to make now.

Apr 29, 2026

The Stack You Built for Your Analysts Won’t Work for Your Agents

While nearly two-thirds of enterprises have experimented with AI agents, fewer than 10% have successfully scaled them, with 80% citing data limitations as the core obstacle. This article explores why the modern pipeline-centric data stack, designed for human analysts, struggles with autonomous AI systems, and examines the critical shift toward semantic metadata, upstream quality enforcement, and machine-readable context.

Apr 24, 2026

Your Data Team Is Shipping Faster Than It Can Be Trusted. That’s a Problem.

dbt Labs’ 2026 State of Analytics Engineering Report found trust in data has surged to 83% as the top organisational priority — the steepest single-year rise ever recorded — driven by 71% of data professionals concerned about incorrect AI outputs reaching stakeholders. With only 7% of enterprises saying their data is completely AI-ready and Gartner finding organisations that see returns invest four times more in data foundations, this article examines the acceleration-to-governance gap and what agent-ready data infrastructure actually requires.