A global report on enterprise software and technical debt in the age of Al.
Based on real benchmark data across tens of thousands of systems, set against the best independent research available.
of code has a low degree of security controls.
AI-generated code carries roughly double the security risk violations of human-written code.
Reducing code-level technical debt can save €870,000 in developer time, per system, per year.
Three years ago, a developer using AI to write code felt novel. In 2026 it is the default.
90% of technology professionals now use AI at work.
The capacity to review that code has not kept pace.
That gap leads to rising technical debt which is the main subject of this report.
1.9% of enterprise production code is now AI-generated. AI-generated code carries roughly double the security risk violations of human-written code, and scores lower on maintainability. The gap widens as codebases grow.
Technical debt accounts for between 21% and 40% of total IT spending. Reducing code-level technical debt can save €870,000 in developer time, per system, per year. Besides, strong architecture can reduce issue-resolution time by 30%.
Maintainability is the most overlooked lever in the IT budget. Systems below the threshold lock in engineering capacity organizations need elsewhere. Industries with the most room to improve: startups and scale-ups, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications.
The average-sized system contains 20 critical security findings. Security risk scales with system size: large systems — the most business-critical and the most targeted — average just 2.8 stars.
Architectural debt is a major concern in technical debt management because it sits between system components, not inside individual files. 50% of code is below our recommended architecture quality score.
Roughly 1.5% of enterprise systems in production qualify as an AI system. Of those, 72% score below SIG’s recommended maintainability rating. Most organizations are still struggling to move AI from the lab into scalable, secure, compliant production.
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A global report on enterprise software and technical debt in the age of Al.
