Build your tech and balance your debt

Every organisation carries technical debt and most carry more than they can account for. What has changed is the interest rate: forty-one percent of executives now name AI as the largest single contributor to the debt they are accumulating.

Models are being wired into estates that were not designed to feed them, and the shortcuts taken to make that work are next year's constraint.

Debt taken deliberately is fine

Shipping something imperfect to learn quickly is a reasonable trade. The problem is not the trade, it is that it is almost never recorded, so nobody can tell deliberate debt from accidental debt six months later.

A register of the shortcuts taken, with the reason and the expected cost of unwinding, turns an argument about engineering standards into a portfolio decision.

Rebalance rather than repay

Attempting to clear all of it is a strategy that never survives contact with a roadmap. The workable version is to shift the ratio: move a defined share of spend from servicing debt toward work that generates value, and hold that ratio as a metric.

Debt attached to systems that are stable and unlikely to change can be carried indefinitely. Debt in the path of everything you want to build next is what needs paying down.

The cloud return question

Fewer than half of companies report getting the returns they expected from cloud, and the shortfall tends to trace back to workloads that were moved without being changed.

Lifting an application onto managed infrastructure changes where the cost lands. Only redesigning it changes how much there is.