AI shifts IT roles towards orchestration, SolarWinds says

SolarWinds has published research showing that four in five IT professionals believe artificial intelligence is changing their role. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 IT workers and leaders.

Its 2026 IT Trends Report found that 80% of respondents believe IT is shifting from an operational role to an orchestration role as AI becomes more embedded in daily workflows. Compared with two years ago, 52% said their work is now more strategic, 52% said it is more automation-driven, 47% said it is more cross-functional, and 41% said it is more complex.

The survey covered staff in IT operations, IT service management, leadership, application and platform engineering, and security. It suggests IT teams are spending more time on strategy, tool management and issue prevention, and less on traditional incident response.

Changing work

That shift does not appear to be easing the burden on teams. Some 81% of respondents agreed that AI is changing how teams work more than how much they work, while 71% said it has made their role more demanding.

The survey also identified new AI-related tasks. Some 59% said they are now interpreting data and AI-driven insights, 56% said they are designing AI-driven workflows, and 47% said they are evaluating and validating AI outputs.

Respondents also reported practical benefits. Around 65% said AI reduces manual effort, and 61% said it speeds up root cause analysis. At the same time, many pointed to trust issues, with 71% saying they need to double-check AI outputs and 62% finding it difficult to trust recommendations.

Taken together, the findings suggest AI is shifting IT work towards oversight and judgement rather than removing the need for staff. The report argues that teams using AI most effectively are those with governance around its use.

Krishna Sai, Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds, said the results show that adoption alone is not enough.

"AI is not making IT simpler - it's making it more consequential. 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," Sai said.

Skills gap

The research also found a gap between senior executives and frontline managers on training. While 61% of frontline managers viewed formal training as the most important element in building AI skills, fewer than four in 10 C-suite leaders agreed.

That points to a wider challenge for companies trying to bring AI into routine operations. As more systems move from offering assistance to taking agentic actions, IT teams are expected to know when to trust them, when to intervene, and how to set controls around them.

Infrastructure was another concern. Some 83% of respondents agreed that AI is only as effective as the data it can access, yet 67% reported at least moderate fragmentation across their IT environments. According to the study, fragmented systems across cloud, on-premises and hybrid estates can limit what AI tools are able to do.

Product launch

Alongside the report, SolarWinds introduced SW1, described as an agentic digital teammate for IT teams. The product is available in SolarWinds Observability SaaS and self-hosted IT environments.

SW1 is designed to give IT teams a single interface for querying agents in natural language, accessing information on system performance, capacity and health, and automating workflows across different environments. It is built around what SolarWinds calls an AI by Design approach, with rules on where AI can operate autonomously and where human oversight is required.

The launch places SolarWinds among software vendors trying to turn AI research into products for day-to-day IT administration. The report's findings suggest the market for such tools may depend less on headline automation claims and more on whether users believe the outputs are reliable enough to act on without repeated checking.

For employers, the numbers also suggest AI may raise expectations of IT teams rather than reduce them. As routine operational tasks become more automated, the role appears to be shifting towards co-ordination, judgement and governance, with staff expected to oversee systems that can act with greater autonomy.

That challenge is reinforced by the fact that 67% of respondents reported at least moderate fragmentation in their IT environments, underlining the operational barriers that still stand in the way of broader AI use.