Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With all we’ve seen from AI in the last several years, it can be easy to forget that it’s still in its very early days. As torrid as its evolution has been thus far, it will only intensify. As SVP of Engineering at a B2B SaaS company, I’ve had a front-row seat for much of this evolution. Here are three ways I see AI heading in 2026.

Anyone who has ever attempted to learn the guitar knows the lure of buying high-end gear. Surely, an expensive guitar and a best-in-class amplifier will hide the fact that you only know a few chords and maybe the lead line to that one song you keep hearing on the radio. What most players find out, however, is that spending thousands of dollars on gear doesn't change the fact that you're not that good yet.

Gartner has predicted that 2026 will see a 10.6% increase in India’s total IT spend from 2025 (2025: USD 159 billion vs 2026: USD 176.3 billion), with data centres, cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled technologies driving this growth. This isn’t just a budget increase; it’s a fundamental shift in where innovation happens, who owns the infrastructure, and how we translate AI potential into scalable impact.

A note from Lauren Nagel, Mezmo's VP of Product: At Mezmo, we believe the best observability tools aren't just built for users, they're built with them. Since the launch of Mezmo's AI SRE agent, we've listened and learned from our customers. The feedback and insights have been invaluable in helping our teams refine and enhance the experience. Today, we're excited to share our latest release, packed with improvements and powerful new capabilities that make our AI SRE even faster and more intuitive.

Now, we will explore how this foundational strength translates into organizational maturity and lay out the durable operating habits required to bridge the gap between reactive firefighting and strategic performance engineering.

AI that understands human insight and connects it to the changes that drive real incidents. At Harness, our story has always been about change — helping teams ship faster, deploy safer, and control the blast radius of every modification to production. Deployments, feature flags, pipelines, and governance are all expressions of how organizations evolve their software. Today, the pace of change is accelerating.

When I first started using AI (Cursor, to be more specific) for coding, I was very impressed to see how it could generate such high-quality code, and I understand why it's now one of the most widely used tools for software engineers. As I continued to use them more regularly, I realized they are far from perfect. Their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are used and the context in which they are applied.