Right now, AI is a business puzzle. Some of this has to do with the disorienting speed with which technologies such as large language models and chatbots have evolved from back-room lab projects to front-line business tools. This rapid ascent has put boards under pressure to throw large sums of money at a technology before they understand its full potential or pitfalls.
In his e-book, The Adaptable Enterprise, Red Hat Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer Michael Ferris argues that the deeper issue raised by AI is less about technology than the fact of disruption itself. The organisations that flourish in the AI era will be the ones able to grasp that they are in a battle to adapt to relentless change. Beyond AI, there will be more disruptions. To survive, businesses must work out how to rapidly flex and evolve.
What might this look like? In answer, Ferris proposes the almost organic idea of “adaptable organisations” that are able to assimilate new technologies while remaining focused on rapid experimentation and innovation. The adaptable business, he suggests, is one that can assimilate technology while integrating it with its workforce goals. “The future lies with adaptable enterprises that can understand not only the technical challenges of AI but also foster an innate understanding of its deeper capabilities and potential,” Ferris tells CIO.
The AI-powered enterprise
A 2025 Red Hat survey of IT leaders and engineers in the UK found that business leaders are nervous about their ability to translate current AI investment into tangible returns, with only 11% saying they were “driving customer value” at scale from their investment.
In addition to traditional concerns such as high initial spending, data privacy and technological integration, the survey uncovered deeper organisational anxieties, with 95% experiencing barriers to AI adoption, and 83% mentioning ‘shadow AI’ risk. The AI services and tools being used without IT governance or management oversight is worrying because it repeats past mistakes where new technologies were adopted chaotically, leading to poor outcomes. According to Ferris, avoiding this fate requires organisations to formulate clear goals for their AI investment from the outset, including assessing their current applications and data flows to work out how these should be modernised. However, Ferris believes that people and culture are critical factors. Organisational goals should be shared to encourage a learning process that includes experimentation and a willingness to fail, with clear guardrails to manage risks.
Ferris’s model of durable organisations echoes the open-source ethos that built Red Hat. Businesses should foster collaboration both within and beyond themselves, just as open-source software did. Employees should not be stifled by hierarchies that block creative risk- taking. “The AI enterprise of the future will be a deeply connected enterprise. Organisations must be willing to try new things. These values will be critical to the successful use of AI,” says Ferris.
How OpenShift AI transformed Turkish Airlines
Turkey’s national carrier, Turkish Airlines, offers a glimpse of how the principles of The Adaptable Enterprise along with AI built on Red Hat OpenShift AI can reinforce one another in a virtuous circle. Advised by Red Hat Consulting, this technology infrastructure transformation involved overcoming technical challenges, inefficient processes and fragmented systems.
Through efficient data orchestration, OpenShift AI has transformed the organisation, allowing data scientists to create development workspaces with GPU access in minutes. This has enabled use cases across 60 live models that would be impossible without AI, including real-time dynamic pricing based on passenger behaviour, fraud detection and operational insights such as on-time prediction. It has also boosted the airline’s financial position by $100 million through additional revenue and decreased operational costs.
The airline started with clear objectives and a sense of how AI could help it build a new type of adaptable, more durable organisation, says Ferris. Red Hat AI was chosen because it gave Turkish Airlines a way to make AI “consumable,” sidestepping the technology’s feared complexity.
An important requirement was the ability to support hybrid environments across on-premise, public and private clouds, essential to meet strict Turkish privacy regulations. The OpenShift platform – with OpenShift AI built on top – was designed with this in mind, giving Turkish Airlines the ability to keep sensitive data on-premise while retaining the flexibility of public cloud for other workloads.
“We are an independent platform across both the model architectures and the hardware architectures. Everything we’ve built is open source and the OpenShift platform translates to OpenShift AI,” says Ferris.
According to Ferris, it is not coincidence that open source has been a crucible for this form of AI innovation. Indeed, its values of openness, collaboration and constant experimentation mirror his ideal of the adaptable enterprise of the near future. AI inference and agentic AI are the next wave, but they will not be the last, he predicts.
“Our commitment to open source and open architectures is fundamental to our vision of AI-enabled business. As with previous disruptions, our role is to make a complex technology accessible.”
For more information on how Red Hat can help organisations make complex innovations such as AI stable and reliable, click here.
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