Most companies recognize that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems — not legacy systems — to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years. Many laggard and middle-of-the-pack companies, by comparison, are dramatically underestimating the cloud resources they will need in order to access, power, or train a new generation of intelligent applications presaged by breakthroughs like GPT-3, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tool.