Report: AI Shifts IT Roles as Demands and Complexity Rise

SolarWinds recently released its 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT, examining how AI is reshaping IT roles.

Instead of simply managing systems, IT teams are now expected to interpret AI-driven insights, design automated workflows, and govern increasingly autonomous environments.

The shift is creating a paradox: while AI reduces manual effort, it is simultaneously raising the stakes for decision-making, accountability, and trust.

IT professionals see work becoming more strategic as complexity rises

The report surveyed over 1,000 professionals across IT Ops, IT service management, leadership, application and platform engineering, and security.

Among the report’s key findings is that 80 percent of respondents agreed that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators. IT professionals see their role as:

• 52 percent more strategic
• 52 percent more automation-driven
• 47 percent more cross-functional
• 41 percent more complex

IT professionals are increasingly spending more time on proactive strategy, tool management, and issue prevention. They’re focusing less on traditional tasks like incident response.

How AI adoption is shifting the nature of IT work

The report highlights that AI is playing a significant role in how teams work, with 81 percent agreeing that AI is changing work more than how much they work. Further, 71 percent say AI has made their role more demanding.

AI is adding new responsibilities such as interpreting data and AI-driven insights (59 percent), designing intelligent AI-driven workflows (56 percent), and evaluating and validating AI outputs (47 percent).

IT professionals said that AI has introduced benefits such as reducing manual effort (65 percent) and faster root cause analysis (61 percent), but it has also introduced friction, such as needing to “double-check” AI outputs (71 percent) and difficulty trusting recommendations (62 percent).

“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.”

Skills gap challenges

Among other findings in the report are those regarding the challenges in the IT skills gap and skill preparedness.

As AI adoption grows, 59 percent of respondents said interpreting AI insights is increasingly important. 

Additionally, 56 percent say designing workflows is becoming more important, while 47 percent say validating outputs is as well.

Skill preparedness also isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition, with 47 percent of C-suite respondents saying that IT is “extremely prepared” for evolving skill requirements. Meanwhile, just 13 percent of technical contributors agree.

What IT leaders should do next

The SolarWinds report also detailed what IT leaders need to do next, based on the data.

Frontline managers (61 percent) said that formal training is the most critical element for building AI skills, but fewer than 40 percent of C-suite leaders agree. 

Understanding when to trust AI, override it, and govern it is a new skill set that doesn’t develop through exposure alone as AI moves from assistive to agentic.

Governance remains crucial to AI success

Further, IT leaders need to build governance before it’s needed. Organizations are deploying AI faster than they’re defining the rules around it. 

With an “AI by Design” approach, clear policies on where AI operates autonomously and where human oversight is required are what make adoption sustainable.

Additionally, 83 percent of respondents said that AI is only as effective as the data it can see, but 67 percent report at least moderate fragmentation in their IT environments. 

The foundation that determines what AI can deliver comes down to unified visibility across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure.

How SolarWinds is evolving its tech to keep up 

According to the organization, IT teams need AI that works together, can be trusted, and makes the orchestrator’s job manageable.

SolarWinds is introducing SW1 in response to this. This solution is an agentic digital teammate built on the SolarWinds Agentic Framework and guided by AI by Design principles.

SW1 evolves SolarWinds’ agentic AI into a unified, governed identity to enable IT teams to query agents in natural language, gain unified insights into system performance, capacity, and health, and automate workflows across their environments.

It’s currently available in SolarWinds Observability SaaS and Self-Hosted IT environments. Additional capabilities are also planned for the remainder of 2026.