Technology leaders should see 2026 as a time for operational resilience to shift from ambition to accountability. In 2025, too many cloud services outages and disruptions took place across the public and private sectors, and now regulatory, technological and cultural pressures are converging to say that enough is enough.

Outages often translate into broader repercussions for the organisation, including revenue impact, customer churn, share price pressure and potentially regulatory reporting obligations. Operational metrics must now be discussed alongside financial KPIs at the board level. C-suite leaders understand accountability, especially within the very regulated financial sector.

DORA’s First Birthday

It’s now been one year since the implementation of the Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, introduced by the EU to strengthen the digital resilience of financial institutions. By now, organisations have had time to consider moving from mere compliance to creating a competitive edge from their investments.

Enterprise tech leaders are in the middle of a balancing act. They’re managing ongoing modernisation and transformation initiatives while navigating multi-jurisdictional regulatory scrutiny. At the same time, they face constant pressure from the board and must meet evolving customer needs—all competing for immediate attention. The stakes have never been higher. Operations teams are no longer viewed as a back-office IT function. Their success in keeping the organisation running and driving revenue is now a board-level concern.

For organisations today, IT is business delivery.

A year of DORA has seen organisations make the shift from focusing solely on mere compliance to setting meaningful demonstrable testing, third-party risk visibility and strictly mandated incident reporting timelines. Financial firms have lessened their exposure to risky situations. Payments providers aren’t only reliant on a single cloud region or SaaS supplier, or unable to provide evidence of real time incident response efforts and auditable logs after a disruption.

One benefit of these overall systemic improvements is enhanced supply chain accountability. Financial institutions and their technology partners are both liable for potential penalties and reputational risk, which makes it highly critical that they can prove their resilience capabilities.

Nevertheless, operational resilience is a continuous discipline. A fragmented incident response can expose firms to regulatory and reputational risk again and again if not addressed systemically. As such, many organisations are looking toward AI agents as part of a move towards ‘no-touch’ operations.

From Autonomy to Self-Healing

Under set policies, autonomous agents can handle incident response and operational tasks, such as detection, triage and remediation. AI agents deployed in operations may become the backbone of L1 (first contact) and L2 (more skilled) support. Contrast this with the traditional, reactive, ticket-driven model of IT. The industry can move much faster and with a higher successful close rate. Leveraging intelligent automation reduces mean time to detection/resolution and KPIs around lower incident volumes reaching L3. Additionally, it can lead to improved service availability percentages. Well integrated agents that actually support existing operations teams also help manage the issues around talent shortages faced by many organisations.

A typical incident lifecycle with agentic processes includes several stages depending on the model, but can be summarised as: Anomaly detected, correlated with recent deployment, a remediation script triggered and a human notified if set thresholds were breached. Such no-touch operations are golden in any sector, but particularly with industries such as digital banking and retail, where peak traffic periods demand near-instant response and poor customer experience is a powerful motivator for users to instantly change providers.

IT Standardisation

In addition, consider standardisation as part of strategic infrastructure best practices. There is a role for central operations clouds and operational ‘golden paths’ as solid foundations for reliable operational scale and dependability. Standardisation enables consistent, scalable operational excellence especially across large, distributed enterprises. ‘There is one way and it is the right way’ can be a great time and stress saver for operational teams – particularly if a regulatory notification and clear evidence is required.

For example, a global bank might define a single golden path for deploying customer-facing applications with pre-approved monitoring, incident response workflows, and regulatory reporting templates built in. In an outage, teams follow the same process and automatically capture the evidence required for regulators, avoiding confusion, delays, and compliance risk.

All of these possibilities take us to an exciting new place for an evolved set of developer and operational roles. When organisations enable AI to reshape daily engineering work away from manual firefighting and low-value work it frees headspace and time for developers and engineers to move into more architectural thinking and intelligent oversight of automated systems. These augmented teams will be empowered to manage simple situations instantly and devote more time and attention to the more difficult issues – the edge cases and the strategic necessities.

Enabling Agentic AI

Using another lens, businesses with agentic IT operations capabilities support their current talent, extending their reach and the speed of their response. The winning organisations will be those who deploy agents strategically, freeing up humans for that higher-value work – i.e. L3 expert support – and setting new standards for operational excellence that customers can rely on. Ideally this means making commensurate investment in existing people, training and organisational change management. A culture of continual upskilling and forecasting that points humans to where they make the best impact will be just as important as the autonomous tech tools working alongside them.

Autonomous agents allow many new services, and one of those can be described as self-healing operations. This evolution of the operations world is where predictive detection, automated remediation and embedded resilience all coalesce. With an autonomous process of testing, maintenance and remediation, organisations can focus on finely measuring improved customer trust. They can also enjoy the productivity and revenue benefits of high business continuity and availability.

AI is still a new technology, and many are legitimately concerned with the concept of autonomous agents. There is a need for clear guardrails, audit trails and explainability in automated remediation, and many technology partners have invested in their ability to support across these areas. Moreover, firms must maintain direction with policy-driven automation rather than uncontrolled autonomy, particularly in regulated industries.

Mandate Operational Excellence

This year is very likely to reward organisations that treat operational resilience as core to their business strategy. Those investing in automation, standardisation and governance will set the pace for their industries in an AI-enabled and increasingly autonomous world.

Regulators are already expanding their scrutiny and reliability expectations beyond financial services firms. Across the world, jurisdictions are increasingly looking to strengthen their economies and digital services in particular through resilience and cybersecurity measures. At the same time, agentic operations, and the organisational performance benefits they support, will rapidly become table stakes technology in all sectors. Inevitably, customers will judge brands on digital reliability as much as price or product features when evidence of outages are a click or a headline search away.

Start now. Audit internal incident response maturity, review the potentially complex web of third-party IT dependencies and identify where automation makes clear business sense. While resilience is an investment in compliance, it is also critical to ensure customer trust and future stability.

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