Nutanix has released findings from the healthcare edition of its eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index survey, showing that healthcare organisations are accelerating AI adoption faster than their infrastructure can support it. The report highlights rising shadow AI use, growing demand for data sovereignty, and a widening gap between AI ambition and readiness at the point of care.
The survey suggests healthcare leaders recognize AI’s potential to improve clinical decision-making, productivity and operational efficiency, but many still lack the secure, low-latency infrastructure needed to deploy it safely. As AI shifts closer to the bedside, where much of healthcare data is generated, the pressure on IT teams is increasing, particularly around governance, compliance and performance.
Daryush Ashjari, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Solution Engineering, APJ at Nutanix, said healthcare organisations across APJ are under pressure to adopt AI, but clinician demand is colliding with infrastructure limitations. He said healthcare leaders need a unified hybrid approach that balances data sovereignty requirements with the real-time insights required in clinical settings.
The report found that shadow AI is already widespread in healthcare, with 79% of organisations seeing AI applications or agents introduced by employees outside IT. About 83% said those tools create business risk, while the same share said silos between business units and IT make technology implementation more difficult.
Infrastructure readiness remains a major concern. Nutanix said 88% of healthcare IT leaders do not believe their current infrastructure is fully ready to support AI workloads on-premises, even as AI inference at the point of care becomes more important for reducing latency and maintaining clinical continuity. The report also noted that high-density environments such as ICUs generate large volumes of data and require local processing to support connected devices and bedside workflows.
Container adoption is also gaining momentum as healthcare providers modernise their application strategy. The survey found that 86% of organisations said AI is accelerating their use of containers, while 80% are already building new applications in containerised environments. Nutanix said containers can help hospitals keep data close to where it is generated while enabling real-time AI insights without compromising performance.
The report also pointed to growing interest in AI agents. More than half of respondents expect AI agents to improve productivity, transform business processes and even create new products or services. Over the next three years, 57% expect to use agentic AI or autonomous agents, alongside generative AI and predictive analytics tools.
Data sovereignty emerged as another key priority, with 72% of healthcare organisations saying it is a high priority or must-have in infrastructure decisions. The report said this reflects the sensitivity of protected health information and the need to control where data is stored and processed.
The research was based on a global survey conducted in November 2025 by Wakefield Research among 1,600 cloud, IT and engineering executives across multiple countries, with the healthcare findings drawn from that broader dataset. Together, the results point to a sector embracing AI quickly, but still working to build the infrastructure needed to support it securely and at scale.
