As we take a look at enterprise automation trends for 2026, one big change stands out across the board: Orchestration is on the rise as more organizations unify automations across teams, tools, and environments to reduce operational friction and improve resilience.
Other impactful enterprise IT automation trends reflect real operational change. They affect everything from how teams coordinate work and resolve incidents to how they scale automation without adding complexity or risk.
Below, we explore the leading trends shaping enterprise IT automation in 2026 and address some of the most common questions IT, infrastructure, and operations leaders are already asking.
What Is the Difference Between IT Automation and Orchestration?
IT automation executes individual tasks while orchestration coordinates multiple automated tasks across systems, teams, and workflows to deliver an autonomous, end-to-end process.
To understand what’s driving some of the biggest emerging trends, it’s important to establish that automation and orchestration produce different effects in enterprise IT environments. Automation offers speed and efficiency at the task level. This can include restarting a service, provisioning a virtual machine, or updating a configuration automatically. Orchestration ties these together to determine when those automated tasks should run, in what order, across which systems, and under what policies.
A single operational change such as onboarding a new application or scaling network capacity often spans multiple domains. Even simple changes can involve NetOps, DevOps, and InfraOps at different points in the process, so when automation exists only within individual teams or tools, handoffs will be manual, inconsistent, and slow.
Orchestration solves this problem by acting as a coordination layer. It connects existing automations, enforces policies, and increases visibility across workflows so teams can operate as a system instead of in silos.
This shift from task-based automation to coordinated, cohesive orchestration forms the foundation for the most impactful enterprise IT automation trends emerging in 2026.
1. Cross-Team Orchestration Becomes Standard
In complex enterprise environments, automation that is confined to individual teams can become a liability. Yet in many organizations, NetOps, DevOps, and InfraOps still automate independently and use different tools, scripts, and approval processes.
By 2026, about 30% of enterprises are expected to automate more than half of their network operations. As automation volume increases, the cost of misalignment like configuration drift, duplicated effort, and delays rises with it. Adding to those risks, many current approaches just don’t scale.
New automation trends are driven by a focus on scalability and modernization. Cross-team orchestration aligns with these by:
- Coordinating automated actions across NetOps, DevOps, and InfraOps
- Standardizing workflows to execute changes consistently
- Reducing reliance on manual handoffs and ticket-based approvals
- Providing shared visibility into status, dependencies, and outcomes
Each team retains control over its domain, but orchestration ensures the work moves forward without unnecessary friction.
As enterprises push automation deeper into daily operations, cross-team orchestration is becoming the standard operating model. It creates highly repeatable actions that occur automatically and provide shared context and visibility.
2. Observability Triggers Automated Remediation
In 2026, the role of observability is expanding. Enterprises are increasingly using observability signals not just to detect issues, but to automatically initiate remediation through orchestrated workflows.
It’s no coincidence that automatic workflows are on the rise at the same time as AI. In fact, it’s simple: More advanced intelligence gives teams new orchestration opportunities.
How Is AI Changing IT Automation?
AI is the mechanism that shifts IT automation from reactive execution to event-driven, decision-based workflows. By applying intelligence to observability data, systems can determine independently when and how to act.
In practice, AI-powered orchestration helps enterprises:
- Analyze real-time signals such as performance degradation, threshold breaches, or failed integrations
- Determine the appropriate remediation based on context and policy
- Execute fixes automatically across affected systems
This model dramatically reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and helps teams address recurring issues consistently.
3. Self-Service Automation Replaces Ticket Queues
New automation trends are also reshaping how internal IT services are delivered. Manual ticket queues are now being replaced with self-service automation.
In this model, users and teams can trigger pre-approved workflows themselves. Every action complies with policy, security, and operational standards.
Self-service automation delivers clear benefits:
- Faster delivery without sacrificing control
- Reduced workload for central IT teams
- Consistent execution across environments and regions
Importantly, this trend doesn’t remove IT oversight. Orchestration just provides the visibility and governance needed to track who triggered what, when it ran, and how it affected downstream systems.
4. Vendor-Agnostic Orchestration for Hybrid Environments
Enterprise infrastructure in 2026 is rarely uniform. Most organizations operate across on-premises systems, multiple cloud providers, and a growing ecosystem of SaaS and vendor tools. Managing automation across this landscape requires a vendor-agnostic approach.
Instead of building and maintaining custom integrations for each system, your teams can connect tools through APIs and reusable workflows.
How Do You Integrate Automation With Existing IT Systems?
The most effective way to integrate automation with existing IT systems is through API-first orchestration that connects current tools instead of replacing them. This accommodates consistent workflows across hybrid and multi-vendor environments that won’t introduce brittle point integrations.
With API-first orchestration, enterprises can:
- Standardize automation across diverse vendors and platforms
- Adapt workflows as tools or environments change
- Scale automation without increasing technical debt
Orchestration facilitates greater resilience and flexibility in your automations even if vendors, architectures, or priorities change later.
5. Orchestration as an Operational Control Layer
As automation trends expand in scope, enterprises are beginning to treat orchestration as a control layer that governs how automation runs across the entire organization.
This control layer provides visibility that helps IT leaders understand not just what is automated, but how automation behaves at scale.
What Tools Are Used for Enterprise IT Automation?
Modern enterprise IT automation relies on a set of orchestration platforms, observability tools, and low-code workflow builders that increase visibility, reusability, and governance across systems.
Low-code platforms play a particularly important role. As much as 87% of enterprise developers now rely on low-code platforms across areas such as operations, analytics, and supply chain management. These tools allow more teams to benefit from automation while maintaining centralized oversight.
Rather than adding complexity, orchestration simplifies operations by making automation predictable, consistent, observable, and aligned with business goals.
Final Thoughts
The success of enterprise IT automation in 2026 is defined less by a given number of automated tasks and more by how well those tasks are coordinated. As environments become more distributed and operational demands increase, orchestration is emerging as the key to scale automation without friction.
Intelliflow, built on IBM Concert, supports organizations looking to adopt these automation trends by helping orchestrate existing automations and connecting teams and tools. It provides a centralized control layer that improves resilience and adapts readily to change.
Ready to move beyond isolated automation and toward coordinated, enterprise-wide orchestration? Now is the time to take the next step. Schedule a demo to learn more today.
