by Jonathan Anthony
Enterprise AI infrastructure modernization has reached a critical crossroads as organizations grapple with decades of technical debt while facing intense pressure to deploy AI — and returning to IT fundamentals is now the only viable path forward.
Nowhere is that collision more visible than at the intersection of platform engineering and AI-driven infrastructure, where organizations are discovering that the race to deploy AI is won or lost long before the first model hits production. Enterprise AI infrastructure modernization is now nonnegotiable, as boards are demanding returns on AI investment while IT teams get buried under complexity they never fully resolved, according to Matt Hicks (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc.
“From the board level down … you have a feeling of, ‘We have to be able to harness what this technology can do,'” Hicks said “They apply that top-down pressure, and then if you are in the IT team, for the last 10 years, we have been trying to get to cloud or ending up in multiple spots, dealing with tons of technologies, but not always maintaining technical debt. That is all crashing down on them at the same time.”
Hicks spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Red Hat Summit 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed enterprise AI infrastructure modernization, the organizational pressures reshaping IT teams and how the future of engineering work is being redefined by AI agents. (* Disclosure below.)
