The 2025/26 Data Maturity Index highlights a sector caught between ambition and capability. While companies continue to adopt AI tools at pace, many organisations remain constrained by low data literacy, fragmented data governance, and the absence of coherent data strategies. The result is a mid-maturity plateau: evidence of progress, yet limited capacity to convert advanced technology into meaningful operational value.
This year’s index, based on insights from more than 100 global data leaders, reports a significant increase in AI adoption. Forty per cent of respondents said AI tools are now used widely across their organisation or within specific departments, almost doubling the 2024 figure. Notably, no respondents said AI is absent from their organisation, signalling full market penetration for the first time.
However, broader use of AI has not been accompanied by improvements in data literacy. Fifty-eight per cent of data leaders stated that most employees are not data literate, while an additional three per cent reported almost no data literacy across their workforce. This literacy gap is emerging as a critical limiting factor for digital construction, where effective data interpretation underpins safety, project delivery, asset management, and decision-making.
Key barriers to improving data literacy include limited leadership engagement, insufficient time and resources, entrenched cultural resistance, and restricted access to training. These obstacles reflect ongoing structural challenges within the built environment, where digital change is often uneven and dependent on departmental priorities rather than cross-business alignment.
People focussed investment
Caroline Carruthers, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Carruthers and Jackson, emphasised the need for people-focused investment if organisations are to realise value from AI and data. She noted that while organisations are embracing a wide range of technologies, the transformational potential of data will remain out of reach without sustained attention on human capability and confidence.
The Data Maturity Index also reveals gaps in strategic direction. Twenty-eight per cent of respondents reported having no data strategy, limiting their ability to define priorities, assign ownership, or measure progress. Digital construction organisations without clear strategies may struggle to integrate data across project phases or demonstrate compliance within increasingly complex regulatory frameworks.
Data governance remains another area of concern. Forty-two per cent of data leaders said their organisation has adopted multiple governance approaches across different departments, while 36 per cent reported having little or no framework at all. Although this figure has decreased marginally over the past three years, the continued absence of consistent governance exposes organisations to operational and commercial risks.
Carruthers warns that organisations operating without a unified governance framework risk falling into a “data black hole” where data becomes unmanageable and unreliable. This fragmentation also restricts the development of cross-business data strategies at a time when organisations are shifting from compliance-driven approaches, shaped historically by GDPR, to more purpose-driven conversations about data’s role, value, and direction.
As digital construction enters what Carruthers describes as the ‘second coming’ of data, organisations must stabilise their foundations to convert AI adoption into measurable outcomes. This includes addressing data quality issues, improving integration, adopting practical governance models, and investing in role-specific data literacy. Embedding analytics into decision workflows is also critical to moving beyond the mid-maturity plateau.
The Data Maturity Index makes clear that the next phase of digital construction depends not only on tools, but on people, governance, and strategy. Organisations that strengthen these foundations will be best positioned to harness AI, reduce risk, and create long-term value across the built environment.
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