7 Insights from the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2026, and Why You Shouldn't Ignore Them
Every year, SolarWinds surveys over 1,000 IT professionals worldwide. The 2026 report asks a specific question: as AI and automation take over more of the technical work, what is happening to the people, teams, and organisations behind it?
The answers are worth reading carefully. Some of them confirm what you probably suspect. Others might be uncomfortable.
Here are the 7 insights that stood out most, and what they mean if you are making decisions about IT, technology, or your team right now.
- The Gap Between Leadership and Frontline Staff Is Wider Than Most Organisations Admit
47% vs 13%
C-suite executives who say their IT team is extremely prepared for AI’s demands versus Technical Contributors who agree.
Nearly half of senior leaders say their IT teams are extremely prepared for AI. And only 13% of the technical staff doing the work agree.
That is a 34-point gap between how prepared leadership thinks their teams are, and how prepared those teams believe they are.
The issue is not that leaders are intentionally out of touch; it is that day-to-day friction is rarely visible from the top. When decisions about AI investment, rollout timelines, and team expectations are built on an inflated picture of readiness, the strategy looks solid until it meets reality.
- AI Adoption Is Broader on Paper Than It Is in Practice
The headline figure says 50% of organisations have embraced AI. If you look closer, you will find out only 16% have done so completely. Over one-third are still outrightly resisting it, and 12% are genuinely neutral.
What’s interesting is where adoption is working. Mid-sized organisations (roughly 250 to 5,000 employees) are outperforming both smaller and larger ones. Small companies are often constrained by budget and bandwidth. Large ones run into the kind of bureaucratic resistance that slows everything down. The middle ground seems to offer just enough scale to invest, and just enough agility to move.
If you are trying to benchmark where your organisation should be, that middle-tier trajectory is worth paying attention to.
- AI Is Delivering Real Value, But Not Where Most People Expect
In daily IT operations, AI is proving most useful in three areas:
- Reducing manual effort – 65% of respondents report meaningful time savings
- Faster root-cause analysis when systems fail – 61% see faster diagnosis and resolution
- More confident decision-making – 49% say AI improves judgment under pressure
Those are practical, measurable gains. But if you push past the headline uses, the picture shifts.
Only 38% say AI has improved outage prevention. Just 27% have seen a real reduction in alert noise. For now, AI performs best as a layer of support for human decisions, not as a replacement for them. Organisations that have deployed it as the latter are running into problems that show up quietly, then all at once.
- AI Is Shifting Workload, Not Removing It
71% of IT professionals say AI has made their roles more demanding, not less.
This might be the most important finding in the report, and the one most business leaders are not prepared for.
When AI takes over repetitive tasks, it not only reduces the workload but also shifts it.
Teams now spend more time checking if the output is correct, handling governance and compliance, fitting AI results into workflows that weren’t designed for them, and trying to keep up with tools that evolve faster than most training can cover.
Deploying AI without adjusting expectations, workload, or support structures does not make your IT team more efficient. It gives them a different kind of pressure with the same constraints. That then becomes a planning problem!
- Trust Is the Real Blocker, And It Is Being Earned Slowly
71% of respondents say their biggest frustration with AI is having to double-check everything it produces. 62% say they find it hard to trust AI recommendations at all.
That level of skepticism does not come from teams being resistant to new tools. It comes from experience. AI has given enough wrong, incomplete, or context-free answers that people have learned to treat it as a first draft, not a final answer.
83% of respondents agree that AI is only as effective as the quality and range of data it can access. That is the real starting point. Before organisations can fix the trust problem, they need to fix the data problem. Clean inputs. Clear policies. Defined guardrails. Without that foundation, every AI output is building on shaky ground.
- IT Roles Are Genuinely Changing, But the Transition Is Uneven
80% of IT professionals agree that their roles are shifting from execution to governance: less time doing the technical work directly, more time managing the systems and tools that do it. 52% say roles are becoming more strategic, another 52% agree that it is more automation-driven, and 47% say it is more cross-functional.
But here is the catch: Only 13% of technical contributors strongly agree with that framing. Most are still deep in the operational work. The shift is real, but it is happening at different speeds for different people in the same organisation.
For business leaders, that has practical implications for hiring, performance expectations, and how you structure your IT team. The skills that mattered three years ago and the skills that matter now are not the same list.
- Leaders And Their Teams Are Often Focused on Different Problems at the Same Time.
When asked what IT teams need most to work effectively with AI, the answers split clearly by role:
Leaders said: clearer policies and guardrails.
Frontline staff said: formal training.
Both groups are right. They are just dealing with different layers of the same problem. Leaders are thinking about organisational risk. Engineers are thinking about day-to-day capability. When neither group gets what they need, adoption stalls and frustration builds in both directions.
The report also points to some specific friction points worth naming:
- 43% cite data privacy and security concerns as a barrier to effective AI use
- 28% flag platform fragmentation, too many disconnected tools, no coherent workflow
- 17% simply do not have the time to build AI literacy while keeping up with their current workload
These are solvable problems. But they require someone to name them clearly and commit to fixing them, not just noting them in a strategy deck.
What This Report Is Really Pointing To
The organisations seeing real results from AI are not the ones with the most tools or the most ambitious rollout plans. They are the ones who have been honest about where their gaps are and have taken deliberate steps to close them.
Leadership alignment, team training, data quality, governance. These are not the exciting parts of an AI strategy. They are the parts that determine whether the exciting parts work.
What Should Business Leaders Do Next?
Based on the report’s findings, here are four practical steps worth prioritising:
- Bridge the perception gap. Have an honest conversation with your IT team, not only your IT leadership, about where things really stand with AI readiness.
- Invest in training, not tools alone. Both IT leaders and frontline staff agree that formal training programmes are essential. Buying software without upskilling your people is a shortcut to disappointment.
- Build governance frameworks early. Data privacy concerns and a lack of clear AI policies are the biggest inhibitors to effective AI use. Get ahead of this before it becomes a crisis.
- Redefine what “IT success” looks like. As roles shift from execution to orchestration, your performance metrics, KPIs, and even your hiring profiles need to evolve alongside them.
Ready to Turn These Insights into Action?
This is exactly the kind of conversation we love having with our clients. We bring you the technology and help you understand what it means for your specific business, where you are right now, and what a smart, sustainable path forward looks like.
The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2026 has given us a clear picture of where the industry is heading. The question is: where is your organisation in that picture?
Let’s talk today and map out a technology strategy that is built around your business discover@ha-shem.com
