Grafana Labs Survey: AI Adoption Is Outpacing Trust as Enterprises Push Toward Autonomous Operations

Grafana Labs' 2026 State of Observability survey finds 85% of IT leaders are comfortable with AI investigating incidents, but only 50% are comfortable letting it deploy changes to production

SAN FRANCISCO, October 19, 2026--Grafana Labs, the company behind the open agentic observability cloud, today released findings from The 2026 State of Observability Report, survey in partnership with ETR, a Futurum company, revealing a growing gap between how quickly organizations are putting AI to work and how much autonomy they are prepared to give it.

AI is now embedded across observability, as organizations look to investigate incidents faster, reduce on-call burden and automate more operational work. However, widespread adoption is not necessarily translating into the same level of comfort with autonomous action. While 85% of IT leaders are comfortable with AI conducting read-only investigations, 52% are comfortable letting it fully remediate incidents on its own.

"AI is already changing both sides of observability. Teams are using it to understand and operate increasingly complex systems, while at the same time they need visibility into the AI applications and agents they're putting into production," said Anthony Woods, Co-Founder, Grafana Labs. "The next step is figuring out how much authority we're prepared to give AI. There's a meaningful difference between trusting it to tell you what's wrong and letting it make a change in production. A future of autonomous action isn't possible unless AI has a clear understanding of how your software and systems work. That's where we're focused: Grafana Assistant uses the telemetry you already collect to understand your infrastructure and applications, and AI Observability extends that to show how your agents are behaving. The more autonomous these systems become, the more important that visibility is."

AI is improving operations, but autonomy raises the bar for trust

Sixty-eight percent of organizations have already moved AI past investigation into active pilots or production use, demonstrating how quickly the technology is becoming part of the observability stack. At the same time, organizations are seeing tangible benefits from AI in day-to-day operations. Sixty-seven percent say AI-powered tooling has improved the on-call experience for engineering teams, including 28% who say it has significantly reduced on-call burden and alert fatigue.

As organizations move beyond simply experimenting with AI, they are also determining how much responsibility they are prepared to give it. While 85% are comfortable with AI conducting read-only investigations, 52% are comfortable with fully autonomous remediation. Respondents point to a proven accuracy track record and greater explainability as the clearest paths to building greater trust in AI-generated observability insights, cited by 45% each.