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How Top IT Ops teams Are Operating

How top IT ops teams are operating in 2026

IT ops in 2026 isn't a single playbook — it's six plays running at once on the same operating-model logic. Discover the six plays the teams pulling ahead are running today.

Plays preview

How the top teams are running operations in 2026

The full brief unpacks six plays — each paired with quick actions you and your team can use to put them to work today. Here's a preview of three.

Play 01

Run AIOps in production — and treat MTTR as an operating-model signal

Early adopters are cutting MTTR by 50%+
Gartner forecasts 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of network activities by 2026, up from under 10% in mid-2023. The teams pulling ahead piloted in 2024 and are in production now — wiring AIOps to business impact (every alert filtered by Critical Business Function risk) and reporting MTTR as a leading indicator of operating-model maturity, not a tools metric.
Gartner September 2024 · Gartner 2025

Play 02

Write the agentic-AI governance playbook before the first agent ships

40% of enterprise apps will embed AI agents by EOY 2026
Gartner forecasts 40% of enterprise apps will embed task-specific AI agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, and multi-agent inquiries surged 1,445% in one year. The teams pulling ahead are sequencing adoption (anomaly noise reduction first, autonomous remediation later), drafting blast-radius limits and rollback paths, and standing up observability for agent decisions themselves — before the first agent ships, not after the first outage.
Gartner August 2025 · Gartner 2025

Play 03

Walk the observability consolidation line now — it's the precondition for AIOps and agentic adoption

52% of teams plan to consolidate in the next 12–24 months
84% of observability users struggle with costs and complexity, $130K+/month bills are now common, and 52% of teams plan to consolidate in the next 12–24 months. The play is to define the unified-view target state first — what one screen, what business signals on it — before evaluating tools, and to price the switching cost honestly when building the business case.
Gartner 2025 · New Relic 2025 · The New Stack 2025
What's inside

Six plays and a worksheet built for your next operations leadership meeting

Each play comes with concrete actions you can put to work, plus a one-page worksheet designed to bring these plays straight into your team conversations.

Play 01

AIOps from experiment to expectation

Wire AIOps to business impact and report MTTR as an operating-model signal — not a tools metric.

Play 02

Agentic AI in infrastructure

Write the agentic governance playbook before the first agent ships, not after the first outage.

Play 03

Platform engineering keeps pace with AI code velocity

Run the platform like a product — backlog, SLOs, dev-NPS — and add AI to the platform itself.

Play 04

Observability consolidation

Define the unified-view target state first, then cut console count in half against it.

Play 05

Multi-cloud simplification

Price the management surface honestly and consolidate the operating model, not the workloads.

Play 06

AI-augmented runbooks for the procedure gap

Treat runbooks as production code and surface them in the incident channel at the moment the alert fires.

About these plays

Built from leading research — Gartner, New Relic, The New Stack, FinOps Foundation, Uptime Institute, and others — these are the six plays we believe CTOs, IT Operations Directors, and Infrastructure Directors should be running to stay ahead in 2026 and beyond.

Simple, Smart, Reliable delivery for what's next.

Tell us what you're working on, and we'll get in touch.

Discover the six plays
Get the six plays and the worksheet, built for your next IT leadership meeting.