SolarWinds’ 2026 State of ITSM Report, drawn from 844 IT professionals, finds AI meeting expectations while workloads hold steady or rise. The survey is precise about where the recovered hours went.
Every respondent to SolarWinds’ 2026 State of ITSM Report, published today, said their organisation is using AI. Generative AI is running in 86% of them, agentic AI in 64%, machine learning in 61%. Nearly two-thirds have been using AI in their ITSM environment for at least a year, with an average of about 16 months in production.
The returns are measured and broadly positive. 84% say AI has met or exceeded ROI expectations. 86% report improved employee productivity, with 47% calling the improvement significant. AI saves an average of 3.3 hours a week on detecting and flagging issues, 3 hours on responding to end-user requests, and 2.9 hours on triaging tickets.
71% say their total workload has stayed the same or increased. 7% say AI’s costs matched what they expected going in.
“We’re at an inflection point in IT service management. AI adoption is no longer the hard part — the hard part is building the organizational discipline to make AI actually deliver,” said Brad McGinity, GM of ITSM at SolarWinds. Teams that get it right, he added, are not simply running a faster service desk.
The survey is specific about where the recovered hours went. 48% of respondents name managing and maintaining AI tools and integrations. 47% name reviewing and validating AI-generated outputs. 37% name training and fine-tuning models. 35% name onboarding and training staff on new tools, and 27% name governing and auditing AI decisions and actions. Nearly three-quarters spend 3 or more hours a week on AI maintenance; 44% spend more than 6.
The costs that surprised organisations were not the setup costs. Staff training (48%), data quality and cleanup (47%) and ongoing tuning (45%) topped the list, all of them recurring parts of the operating model rather than one-time expenses. Insufficient data quality and integration complexity are the two reasons respondents most often give for AI failing to deliver expected value.
The posture is also still largely backward-facing. SolarWinds’ announcement says respondents named identifying issues (31%) and prioritising and routing them (23%) as AI’s greatest impact across the incident lifecycle, against 19% for preventing issues before they occur. Budget momentum suggests organisations recognise the gap: 85% say their AI budget for ITSM has increased year on year, 36% significantly, with agentic workflows showing the highest expected investment growth of any category in the survey.
Adoption is not being driven from above. 56% name their own IT leadership strategy as the primary pressure to adopt, against 15% citing executive mandates and 9% citing business unit demands. IT leadership owns both the opportunity and the accountability.
For Gulf enterprises the compression is the story. “The pace and scale of AI investment in the region means the gap this report identifies, between adoption and real operational payoff, is being compressed into a much shorter window, and the resulting business impact is amplified,” said Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt, Regional Director, Middle East, SolarWinds. “Without the same governance and data discipline the report calls out, speed just gets you to the workload problem sooner.”
The report identifies one lever with a number attached to it. Teams measuring AI by activity — ticket volume, response times — are 2.4 times more likely to report increased workload than teams measuring outcomes. Only 21% currently measure in outcome or experience terms. The way a team defines success changes how the work feels day to day.
