- 14 | 05 | 2026
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OASIS’ David Reynolds shares his takeaways from IRMS 2026
AI is everywhere The foundations aren't there yet
Coming away from IRMS 2026 it is clear that nobody working in information management is surprised by the pace at which AI is being adopted. What’s striking isn’t the enthusiasm; it’s the professional concern around it: organisations are being asked to build intelligent systems on top of information estates they haven’t fully got under control, and most of them don’t yet realise that’s what they’re doing.
If your information isn’t accurate, consistently managed and properly retained, your AI outputs will quietly reflect that at scale. The profession understands this. The people commissioning AI projects often don’t. That gap is where the real risk lives.
Thinking about AI readiness and what it means for your information estate?
The blind spot The physical estate
It’s easy to focus on the digital layers, the cloud, the network, the governance framework and forget that information infrastructure goes deeper than that. The archive boxes in offsite storage, the backup tapes, the records that predate your current systems or the documents scanned years ago and filed somewhere nobody’s looked since.
This is still where most organisations have their biggest gaps, not because people don’t care, but because the physical layers are easy to deprioritise when the pressure is on digital transformation and AI readiness. The truth is, you cannot build a trustworthy, compliant, AI-ready environment on a foundation you haven’t looked at properly in years. Information is infrastructure and infrastructure needs maintaining.
Not sure what's in your information estate or where the gaps are?
The heavy lifting The profession is carrying more than it should have to
The people doing this work are operating under a genuinely difficult combination of pressures, tightening regulation on one side, organisational demands to adopt AI faster than any governance framework can reasonably keep pace with on the other, and physical information estates that have been chronically underfunded for the better part of a decade.
What comes through clearly, when you speak to them, is a hunger for conversation that meets them where they actually are, not more frameworks, not aspirational theory, but honest and practical thinking about what good information management looks like when you’re working with legacy systems, limited budgets, and a leadership team that wants AI delivered yesterday.
That’s the conversation OASIS is built for. Not the aspirational version of information management. The real version: legacy, complexity, budget constraints and all.
What I'm taking away
The organisations that will navigate the next few years well are the ones treating information management as a strategic function, not an administrative one. The risks are real, but so is the fix. It starts with an honest look at what you’ve actually go, what you hold, where it lives, and who’s responsible for it. From there, you can build something that holds up.
That’s the conversation. We’re ready when you are.
Ready to look at your information estate properly all of it?
OASIS can support you through that journey
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