Vultr, a privately-held, cloud infrastructure company, published its annual 2025 AI Maturity Report: Navigating the Path to AI Success report. This document examines how organizations leverage AI to drive business outcomes.
The reported estimates that 87–91 percent of enterprises see AI adoption as having led to measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, revenue and market share.
“AI maturity is no longer a distant aspiration, but a present-day imperative for organizations seeking to lead in their industries,” said Kevin Cochrane, CMO, Vultr. “Organizations at the most mature stage of AI are raising the bar for success and outpacing their less mature peers in financial performance, innovation and operational efficiency.”
While all respondents were using AI to some extent, the study employs a three-stage model to characterize the level of AI maturity in the respondents’ organizations: operational, accelerated and transformational. The report also includes interviews with AI decision-makers and practitioners.
Findings indicated a clear link between model diversity and AI maturity, seemingly confirming that organizations are accelerating multi-model strategy to strengthen their competitive edge. Other revelations include:
- 81 percent of transformational organizations reporting “better” or “significantly” better financial performance, 25 points above operational peers.
- 63 percent of transformational firms already putting more than 41 percent of their IT budget into cloud, pushing average cloud share toward 43 percent in 2025.
- Transformational organizations running 29 percent more distinct models than operational peers,having grown average model counts 24 percent YOY.
- Hardware and data pipelines slow scale-up, with top blockers being GPU capacity/performance (55 percent), security & compliance (45 percent) and real-time inference limits such as compute (54 percent) and storage throughput (53 percent).
- 30 percent of respondents planning to build new GenAI projects with neocloud providers vs. 18 percent with hyperscalers.
As AI becomes embedded across more business functions—projected to reach 80 percent penetration within the next two years—enterprises investing in open-model portfolios are achieving higher-model diversity and YOY growth in deployed models compared to their less mature peers. The shift toward multi-model strategies and away from reliance on a single cloud provider is empowering organizations to tailor AI deployments to their unique needs and regulatory environments. This supports improved flexibility, security and innovation in enterprise AI deployments.
“As competitive pressures mount, AI has become a clear differentiator,” said Cochrane. “The data shows that a comprehensive, multi-model approach to AI, supported by strategic investment and open, secure ecosystems, delivers measurable business value. For enterprises, the message is clear: those who commit to advancing their AI capabilities now will unlock new levels of innovation, efficiency, and competitive advantage in the years ahead.”
The study – commissioned by Vultr and conducted by S&P Global Market Intelligence – surveyed over 2,000 executives and decision-makers across 12 countries, with respondents representing industries such as healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, financial services, telecom, energy, travel, hospitality, media, gaming and entertainment.
