By By David Ramel10/19/2026
Publication Date: 2026-10-19 00:00:00
Grafana Survey: AI Adoption Outruns Trust in Autonomous Operations
Artificial intelligence is becoming part of enterprise operations faster than IT leaders are getting comfortable letting it act on its own, according to a new Grafana Labs survey. While 85% of respondents are comfortable with AI conducting read-only investigations, just 50% are comfortable letting it deploy changes to production.
Grafana Labs, which sells observability software and services, released the findings Oct. 19, drawing on a survey conducted with ETR, a Futurum company. The research covers 300 senior IT and engineering decision-makers with budget or purchasing influence over observability tools.
The State of Observability, 2026 report examines two sides of enterprise AI adoption: using AI to help operate existing systems and monitoring the AI applications organizations are developing. Both are showing up in spending decisions, alongside questions about reliability, cost attribution and how much authority to give automated systems.
Investigation Is Easier to Trust Than Action
Some 68% of organizations have moved beyond investigating AI into pilots or production use in their observability environments. Nearly half, 47%, say AI is already running in production somewhere in their environment or…
