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75% of Companies Consider AI Essential to Operations

Executive trust in AI agents and reliance on AI across business operations is growing, according to the PagerDuty AI Resilience Survey — 81% of executives trust AI agents to take action on the company's behalf during a crisis, such as a service outage or security event.

AI is moving from experimental to essential. Nearly three-quarters of executives (74%) say their company would struggle to function without it, showing how quickly reliance has grown. Projects that began as pilots and trials are now viewed as mission-critical infrastructure.

Additionally, companies are increasingly using AI in software development, where more than four out of five respondents (84%) report using it to write, review, or suggest code.

Key Findings:

Agentic AI deployment is racing ahead

Three out of four (75%) companies have already deployed more than one AI agent, with a quarter (25%) deploying five or more.

Maturing models drive confidence gains

Executives credit better outputs (49%), more frequent usage with positive results (48%), improved understanding of AI (47%), and stronger oversight measures (45%) as the top reasons for growing confidence.

AI is now seen as mission-critical infrastructure

Nearly three in four executives (74%) view AI as essential to operations, rising to 77% for smaller companies under 10,000 employees. C-suites and owners are especially convinced, with 83% saying their business would struggle without AI compared to 73% of directors and VPs.

Engineers are coding with AI at scale

More than four out of five (84%) companies now use AI to write, review or suggest code. Companies with multiple AI agents are even more likely to rely on AI for coding (91%) compared to those with one agent (68%) or none (44%). While 85% test AI-generated code, only 39% do so consistently through formal processes. The US leads on formal testing (59%) while Japan trails at 19%.

Guardrails lag behind increased adoption

An overwhelming 85% of executives say their organizations need better procedures to detect errors or failures in AI tools, with sentiment being highest in France (90%).

Companies are bracing for AI outages

84% of companies report experiencing at least one AI-related outage. More than half (57%) of those that haven't yet had an outage already have protocols in place for handling one, showing that resilience planning is becoming part of AI strategy.

Experience reveals the hidden complexity of AI

Among respondents whose companies have deployed one AI agent, 76% believe AI-driven complexity will outpace the number of people their company has to manage it. This concern is even higher among those with multiple AI agents at 79%.

In contrast, only 57% of respondents from companies without AI agents anticipate this challenge, suggesting that hands-on experience with AI deployment reveals the true scope of management complexity involved.

Methodology: The report is based on responses from 1,500 IT and business executives across Australia, France, Germany, Japan, UK and US regions.

The Latest

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

75% of Companies Consider AI Essential to Operations

Executive trust in AI agents and reliance on AI across business operations is growing, according to the PagerDuty AI Resilience Survey — 81% of executives trust AI agents to take action on the company's behalf during a crisis, such as a service outage or security event.

AI is moving from experimental to essential. Nearly three-quarters of executives (74%) say their company would struggle to function without it, showing how quickly reliance has grown. Projects that began as pilots and trials are now viewed as mission-critical infrastructure.

Additionally, companies are increasingly using AI in software development, where more than four out of five respondents (84%) report using it to write, review, or suggest code.

Key Findings:

Agentic AI deployment is racing ahead

Three out of four (75%) companies have already deployed more than one AI agent, with a quarter (25%) deploying five or more.

Maturing models drive confidence gains

Executives credit better outputs (49%), more frequent usage with positive results (48%), improved understanding of AI (47%), and stronger oversight measures (45%) as the top reasons for growing confidence.

AI is now seen as mission-critical infrastructure

Nearly three in four executives (74%) view AI as essential to operations, rising to 77% for smaller companies under 10,000 employees. C-suites and owners are especially convinced, with 83% saying their business would struggle without AI compared to 73% of directors and VPs.

Engineers are coding with AI at scale

More than four out of five (84%) companies now use AI to write, review or suggest code. Companies with multiple AI agents are even more likely to rely on AI for coding (91%) compared to those with one agent (68%) or none (44%). While 85% test AI-generated code, only 39% do so consistently through formal processes. The US leads on formal testing (59%) while Japan trails at 19%.

Guardrails lag behind increased adoption

An overwhelming 85% of executives say their organizations need better procedures to detect errors or failures in AI tools, with sentiment being highest in France (90%).

Companies are bracing for AI outages

84% of companies report experiencing at least one AI-related outage. More than half (57%) of those that haven't yet had an outage already have protocols in place for handling one, showing that resilience planning is becoming part of AI strategy.

Experience reveals the hidden complexity of AI

Among respondents whose companies have deployed one AI agent, 76% believe AI-driven complexity will outpace the number of people their company has to manage it. This concern is even higher among those with multiple AI agents at 79%.

In contrast, only 57% of respondents from companies without AI agents anticipate this challenge, suggesting that hands-on experience with AI deployment reveals the true scope of management complexity involved.

Methodology: The report is based on responses from 1,500 IT and business executives across Australia, France, Germany, Japan, UK and US regions.

The Latest

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...