More than 1,300 mainframe practitioners and decision-makers took part in BMC's 2026 Mainframe Survey, and the headline figure — 94% expressing long-term confidence in the mainframe — tells only part of the story. The more instructive numbers sit beneath it, in the gap between what respondents want AI to recommend and what they are prepared to let it complete.
For code management: 40% are comfortable with AI recommending actions, but just 23% would let it follow through. For database reorganisations: 43% welcome a recommendation, while 37% did the same last year — but only 21% are ready to hand over execution. The pattern holds across performance tuning, problem detection, and IMS queue management. Mainframe AI in 2026 is predominantly an advisor, not an operator.
Agent-based mainframe management is the next planned investment for 36% of respondents, with 32% looking to adopt third-party agents. That indicates appetite for greater autonomy is building — but the data also records where trust has not yet reached. Implementation costs remain a barrier for 41%, followed by security and privacy concerns (39%), data integration challenges (37%), and regulatory or compliance friction (22%).
One practical pressure stands out in the findings: digital certificate management. New industry requirements are set to reduce the standard TLS certificate lifecycle to 88 days by 2029, sharply increasing the volume of certificate rotations mainframe shops must handle. At present, 43% of organisations use in-house automated solutions, 31% use product-based automation, and 25% still handle the task manually. That last quarter faces a meaningful workload increase in the next three years.
John McKenny, SVP and general manager of Intelligent Z Optimisation and Transformation at BMC, described the survey as evidence of an industry shifting from experimentation to operational trust — with the path to greater autonomy running through earned confidence rather than a hard cut from human review.
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