New study reveals SRE and platform engineering teams are becoming central to AI governance, observability, and operational resilience
Dynatrace has released findings from its State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026 report, revealing that the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the responsibilities of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and platform engineering teams across large enterprises.
Based on a global survey of 919 senior IT leaders and decision-makers, the research found that organizations are increasingly relying on SRE and platform engineering teams to ensure AI systems remain reliable, scalable, secure, and trustworthy as AI workloads move into production environments.
The study highlights the growing maturity of these functions, with 92% of organizations reporting executive support for SRE initiatives, while 89% of enterprises practicing platform engineering have implemented an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Additionally, 73% of SRE and platform engineering teams now collaborate and share responsibilities, demonstrating how both disciplines are converging to support AI-driven operations.
“SRE and platform engineering laid the groundwork for modern digital reliability, but AI is rewriting the rules. Enterprises need to move from managing systems to orchestrating them, connecting observability, automation, and agentic AI to operate at the speed these initiatives demand and turn insight into action at scale,”
AI model monitoring has emerged as a top priority, with 67% of SREs identifying it as their primary use case, while 58% already use AI-powered capabilities to monitor model performance and accuracy. However, enterprises continue to face challenges, including growing operational complexity, fragmented data, and difficulties integrating existing tools and systems.
The report also found that 94% of platform engineers prioritize AI-powered developer tools, while nearly half of SRE respondents said excessive data sources and metrics hinder effective service-level objective management.
According to Dynatrace, observability is increasingly becoming the control plane for AI-driven operations. The company believes enterprises need greater visibility, governance, and automation capabilities as AI systems become more critical to business operations.
The findings also support Dynatrace’s recently announced intention to acquire Arize, a specialist in AI observability, aimed at bridging the gap between AI development and AI operations and helping organizations better manage AI models throughout their lifecycle.
