Engineering teams are drowning in alerts, incidents, and operational noise. As systems grow more complex, identifying what actually matters — and acting on it fast — has become a serious challenge.

This 2026 AI Impact Report from New Relic cuts through the hype and delivers a data-driven look at how AI-powered observability is transforming engineering productivity, incident response, and deployment velocity at scale.

Based on insights from 6.6 million active users and billions of real-world events, this report reveals what happens when AI is embedded directly into day-to-day operational workflows.

What’s inside the report

In this report, you’ll discover:

  • Why 33% of engineering time is still spent firefighting — and how AI dramatically reduces that burden
  • How AI-enabled teams achieve 25% faster incident resolution on average
  • Why AI-powered observability delivers a 2x higher signal correlation rate, cutting alert noise nearly in half
  • How organisations using AI deploy code up to 5x more frequently than non-AI teams
  • What the data says about reclaiming engineering hours and reinvesting them into innovation and R&D

All findings are drawn from de-identified, aggregated platform data, reflecting real production environments — not lab experiments or theoretical models.

Why this report matters

Alert fatigue, slow incident response, and fragile deployment pipelines aren’t just technical issues — they’re business risks.

This report shows how AI is helping engineering teams move faster without sacrificing stability, creating a new operational baseline where speed and reliability coexist.

Whether you’re a CTO, Head of Engineering, SRE, or DevOps leader, this research provides concrete evidence of how AI-driven observability is reshaping modern software operations.

Download the full 2026 AI Impact Report to explore the data, insights, and practical implications of AI-powered observability — and understand whether your organisation can afford to operate without it.