Riverbed's 2026 State of Autonomous IT Operations survey, published today, reveals a significant gap between enterprise ambition and current reality in AI-driven IT. Across 1,200 respondents spanning seven countries, 76% consider agentic AI critical or very important to their future IT strategy, and 91% say AI investments have met or exceeded return-on-investment expectations. Yet only 19% of IT operations are currently automated, and just 8% report enterprise-wide AI-enabled operations.
The data readiness question is central to the gap. Although 96% of respondents say multi-domain visibility across networks, applications, endpoints and cloud is important for AI-driven IT operations, only 17% have actually achieved fully unified visibility. Similarly, only 21% rate their data quality as excellent and only 23% say the same for data granularity. Data quality and visibility are the two conditions Riverbed identifies as prerequisites for any meaningful move towards autonomous operations.
Governance confidence is limited across all respondent groups. Only 42% are highly confident in their organisation's AI governance capabilities, a figure that falls to 36% among technical specialists. Seventy-seven per cent say their organisation remains hesitant to allow AI to make operational decisions without human approval, and only 24% say they extensively trust AI recommendations with limited human review.
The survey, which covered seven countries and six industries including manufacturing, financial services, government and healthcare, was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in July 2026. On the service desk question, 93% of respondents expect AI-powered operational intelligence to transform frontline IT capabilities within the next two years, but only 34% say their IT teams are extremely effective at using AI to identify and resolve issues before users notice a disruption.
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