Riverbed Study Finds 92% of Decision Makers in the Financial Services Industry Agree that Improving Data Quality is Critical to AI Success

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 4, 2026--

Riverbed, the leader in AIOps for observability, today released Financial Services industry findings from its global survey, ‘The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era, ’ which examines the level of AI readiness across the Financial Services Sector. The results highlight a growing implementation gap as organizations move from AI ambition to real-world impact. While nearly all Financial Services decision-makers (92%) agree that improving data quality is critical to AI success, progress remains uneven: only 12% of AI initiatives have achieved full enterprise-wide deployment, while a significant 62% still remain in pilot or development stages, underscoring the challenges of operationalizing AI in one of the world’s most regulated and risk-sensitive industries.

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However, the Financial Services sector continues to demonstrate strong confidence in the value of AI and AIOps, with 89% of organizations reporting that ROI from their AIOps investments has met or exceeded expectations, reinforcing the industry’s reputation for disciplined, value-driven technology adoption. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents also express a high degree of confidence in their AI strategy. Yet despite this optimism, Financial Services organizations continue to be affected by AI implementation gaps. Amid mounting pressures to optimize operations, strengthen compliance, mitigate risk, and deliver superior digital experiences, this industry is increasingly constrained by data readiness, operational complexity, and the ability to scale AI beyond pilot initiatives.

“Financial Services organizations are among the most sophisticated and disciplined adopters of AI, and our research shows they’re already seeing strong returns,” said Jim Gargan, Chief Marketing Officer, at Riverbed. “However, the sector operates under unique pressures, including rigorous regulatory scrutiny, zero tolerance for downtime and a critical need for data accuracy. What’s clear is that success now depends on simplifying IT, consolidating observability tools and vendors, improving data quality, embracing open standards like OpenTelemetry, and ensuring network and application performance can support AI at scale. At Riverbed, we are actively supporting some of the world’s largest Financial Services organizations as they bridge this gap and turn AI ambition into operational reality.”

AI ambition meets operational reality

For Financial Services institutions, AI success is not defined by experimentation alone; it depends on operational readiness. The research shows that just 40% of Financial Services organizations feel fully prepared to operationalize their AI strategy today. Data remains the most significant constraint as only 43% are fully confident in the accuracy and completeness of all their organizations data, the lowest level of confidence across all industries surveyed.

Crucially, the sector understands what is at stake. 92% of Financial Services respondents agree that improving data quality is critical to AI success, the highest proportion of any industry. This reflects a deep awareness that without trusted, high-quality data, AI initiatives struggle to move from proof-of-concept to production.

Operational complexity drives the push for simplification

These data challenges are compounded by the complexity of today’s IT environments. To support digital services, real-time transactions and growing AI workloads, Financial Services organizations have accumulated fragmented toolsets that limit visibility and slow decision-making. On average, IT teams currently have 13 observability tools from nine different vendors, creating blind spots across applications, networks and user experience.

As a result, 96% of organizations in this sector are actively consolidating tools and vendors across IT operations, with 95% agreeing that a unified observability platform would make it easier to identify and resolve operational issues. Notably, 95% are considering new vendors as part of this consolidation – the highest level among all industries surveyed – signaling a willingness to rethink long-standing technology relationships in favor of a platform that can reduce risk, improve integration and support AI at scale.

Unified communications performance becomes business-critical

As Financial Services continue to digitize client engagement and internal workflows, the performance of unified communications (UC) tools has become business-critical. Employees now spend 41% of their working week using UC tools, and nearly two-thirds say they are essential to operating effectively. Yet performance remains inconsistent. Only 47% of Financial Services organizations are very satisfied with UC performance, while 44% report regular issues across video calls, messaging platforms, and collaborative workspaces.

These challenges create significant operational constraints. UC-related issues account for 16% of all IT tickets, taking an average of 41 minutes to resolve, with nearly one in five tickets requiring more than an hour. In a sector where responsiveness and availability directly affect customer trust, limited visibility and high support demands continue to hinder productivity and experience.

OpenTelemetry underpins observability at scale

To overcome fragmented visibility and support AI-driven operations, Financial Services organizations are increasingly turning to open, standardized observability frameworks. OpenTelemetry plays a critical role by enabling consistent data collection and correlation across applications, infrastructure and user experience, a prerequisite for trustworthy AI in complex, regulated environments.

Encouragingly, the survey shows that Financial Services organizations lead all sectors in OpenTelemetry adoption, with 92% already leveraging the framework. Nearly all respondents (96%) say that cross-domain correlation is critical to their observability strategy, while 99% agree that OpenTelemetry reduces vendor lock-in and increases flexibility. Importantly, 97% view it as a foundation for future initiatives such as AI-driven automation, reinforcing its role as an enabler of long-term AI scalability.

AI data movement and network performance take center stage

As AI initiatives mature, attention is shifting from models to the movement of data that fuels them. Financial Services organizations place greater importance on AI data movement than any other sector surveyed, with 94% viewing it as important to their overall AI strategy and 37% describing it as critical and foundational to how they design and execute AI.

With AI data increasingly distributed across public cloud, edge and co-location environments, network performance and security emerge as decisive success factors, cited as essential by 81% of respondents, the highest of any industry. Looking ahead, 76% of Financial Services organizations plan to establish an AI data repository strategy by 2028, underscoring the need for governed, high-performance architectures that balance innovation with compliance and control.

Find out more about how organizations are overcoming gaps and navigating AI adoption and implementation by viewing the full report here.

* Note: Unless otherwise noted, all data and percentages referenced in the press release are percentages calculated from responses to the Riverbed Global Survey 2025: The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era. Respondents included business and IT leaders and technical specialists across seven countries in the Financial Services industry.

Methodology:

The Riverbed Global Survey on the Future of IT Operations in the AI Era polled 1,200 business decision-makers, IT leaders and technical specialists across seven countries and multiple industries, including financial services. The research was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in July 2025.

About Riverbed

Riverbed, the leader in AIOps for observability, helps organizations optimize their users’ experiences by leveraging AI automation for the prevention, identification, and resolution of IT issues. With over 20 years of experience in data collection and AI and machine learning, Riverbed’s open and AI-powered observability platform and solutions optimize digital experiences and greatly improves IT efficiency. Riverbed also offers industry-leading Acceleration solutions that provide fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app, over any network, to users anywhere. Together with our thousands of market-leading customers globally – including 95% of the FORTUNE 100 – we are empowering next-generation digital experiences. Learn more at riverbed.com

Riverbed and certain other terms used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology LLC. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.

About Coleman Parkes

Coleman Parkes is a full-service B2B market research agency specializing in IT/technology studies, targeting senior decision makers in SMB to large enterprises across multiple sectors globally. For more information, contact IanBeston@coleman-parkes.co.uk

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Riverbed Study Finds 92% of Decision Makers in the Financial Services Industry Agree that Improving Data Quality is Critical to AI Success

Riverbed Study Finds 92% of Decision Makers in the Financial Services Industry Agree that Improving Data Quality is Critical to AI Success

ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state's voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.

The lawmakers' failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session.

“They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.

Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.

But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.

“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who backed a proposal to keep using the machines in 2026 that Senate Republicans declined to consider.

Republican House Speaker Jon Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature” on the possibility of a special session.

Kemp spokesperson Carter Chapman said he Republican governor will examine the situation.

“We’ll analyze all bills, as well as the consequence of those that did not pass,” Chapman said Friday.

House Republicans and Democrats backed Anderson's plan, which would have required that Georgia choose a voting process that didn't use QR codes by 2028. Election officials preferred that solution.

“The Senate has shown that they’re not responsible actors,” Draper said. She added that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, seemed more interested in keeping Trump's backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”

A spokesperson for Jones didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

Joseph Kirk, Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he’ll look to the secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule to instruct election officials how to proceed.

“This is uncharted territory,” he said.

Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for governor, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.”

Burns told reporters that his chamber was seeking to minimize changes this year.

“You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” Burns said.

Anderson said without action, the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November.

Election officials say switching to a new system within just a few months, as advocated by some Republicans, would be nearly impossible.

“They made no way for this to happen except putting a deadline on it," Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said of the switch away from barcodes. Dover said one problem under some plans is that a very large number of ballots would have to be printed.

Lawmakers seemed more concerned about scoring political points than making practical plans, Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said.

“If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us,” Holden said.

Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say voters are more likely to trust in an accurate count if they can see what gets read by the scanner.

Right-wing election activists lobbied lawmakers for an immediate switch to hand-marked paper ballots, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so.

Anderson said he wasn’t sure if a special session could escape those political crosswinds, but said Georgia lawmakers must fix the problem.

“This is a legislative problem,” Anderson said. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”

FILE - Voting machines are seen at the Bartow County Election office, Jan. 25, 2024, in Cartersville, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)