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Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

More automation. More responsibility. The IT role isn't shrinking — it's shifting

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds.

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 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

61% 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

83% 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.

Methodology: In partnership with UserEvidence, SolarWinds surveyed more than 1,000 professionals across IT operations, IT service management, leadership, application and platform engineering, security, and network operations.

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Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

More automation. More responsibility. The IT role isn't shrinking — it's shifting

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds.

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 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

61% 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

83% 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.

Methodology: In partnership with UserEvidence, SolarWinds surveyed more than 1,000 professionals across IT operations, IT service management, leadership, application and platform engineering, security, and network operations.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...