SolarWinds, a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, released its 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT, exploring how AI is reshaping the IT role. In partnership with User Evidence, SolarWinds surveyed more than 1,000 professionals across IT operations, IT service management, leadership, application and platform engineering, security, and network operations.
According to the report, 80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators. Compared to two years prior, IT pros see their roles as:
- 52% more strategic
- 52% more automation-driven
- 47% more cross-functional
- 41% more complex
A clear sign of shifting responsibilities is how IT pros are spending their time — more on proactive strategy, tool management, and issue prevention, and less on traditional tasks like incident response. This signals a higher bar for today’s IT roles: while AI streamlines workflows, it doesn’t reduce workloads — it shifts them toward more complex, strategic work.
AI Effect on IT Roles
The findings show that 81% of IT pros agree that AI is changing how teams work more than how much they work. Also, 71% say AI has made their role more demanding. In addition, AI has added new responsibilities for IT pros, including:
- Interpreting data and AI-driven insights: 59%
- Designing intelligent AI-driven workflows: 56%
- Evaluating and validating AI outputs: 47%
While IT pros highlighted benefits thanks to AI — such as reducing manual effort (65%) and faster root cause analysis (61%) — they also pointed to areas where AI introduces friction, including:
- Needing to “double-check” AI outputs (71%)
- Difficulty trusting recommendations (62%)
The upside is clear. So is the unlock: the teams getting the most from AI aren’t just adopting it — they’re governing it. If teams can address these hurdles, they will be able to further lean into the many positive ways AI is reshaping IT workloads.
“AI is not making IT simpler — it’s making it more consequential,” said Mr. Krishna Sai, Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds. “The teams thriving in this environment are not usually the ones with the most AI tools. Instead, those who are building the governance and structure to actually trust them are seeing the greatest results. That’s what organizations need to get right: not only deploying AI, but also creating the conditions where it can deliver.”
What the Data Says IT Leaders Need to Do Next
- Make training structural, not optional. Sixty-one percent of frontline managers say formal training is the most critical element for building AI skills — yet fewer than 4 in 10 C-suite leaders agree. As AI moves from assistive to agentic, understanding when to trust it, override it, and govern it is a new skill set that doesn’t develop through exposure alone.
- Build governance before you need it. Organizations are deploying AI faster than they’re defining the rules around it — and the data shows it. An “AI by Design” approach, with clear policies on where AI operates autonomously and where human oversight is required, is what makes adoption sustainable.
- Treat infrastructure consolidation as an AI prerequisite. Eighty-three percent of respondents agree AI is only as effective as the data it can see — yet 67% report at least moderate fragmentation in their IT environments. Unified visibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure isn’t just an operational upgrade; it’s the foundation that determines what AI can actually deliver.
The data points to a clear need: IT teams don’t just need more AI; they need AI that works together, that can be trusted, and that makes the orchestrator’s job manageable. To answer that challenge, SolarWinds is introducing SW1™, an agentic AI teammate unveiled today at its annual SolarWinds Day event. Built on the SolarWinds® Agentic Framework and guided by AI by Design principles, SW1 evolves SolarWinds agentic AI into a unified, governed identity — enabling IT teams to query agents in natural language, gain unified insights into system performance, capacity, and health, and automate workflows across their environments. SW1 is currently available in SolarWinds Observability SaaS and Self-Hosted IT environments, with additional capabilities planned throughout 2026.
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