Companies are not looking before they're leaping into the AI playpen

Devops

93% of organizations report infrastructure incidents attributable to AI

AI vendors have been pushing organizations to board the AI hype train as it races by at full speed. But many of the companies doing so, unable to move quite that fast, have stumbled along the way.According to a survey of 406 IT decision makers, 93 percent of organizations have experienced AI-caused infrastructure incidents, but a mere 19 percent had the necessary governance to respond.The survey, conducted in April by Panterra Group at the behest of Spacelift, forms the basis of the orchestration platform's 2026 State of Infrastructure Automation report [PDF]. It posits an "AI Readiness Gap," meaning that companies are adopting AI before they're ready to do so and are paying the price.

"The findings are unambiguous: organizations are using AI to generate infrastructure code at a rate their governance frameworks were never designed to handle,” said Paweł Hytry, co-founder and CEO of Spacelift, in a statement.

The consequences of these incidents, respondents say, consist of reworking AI-generated changes (37 percent), security misconfigurations that reached production (36 percent), compliance violations (36 percent), infrastructure drift attributable to AI changes (35 percent), and incidents caused by agentic systems (33 percent).The report characterizes 24 percent of organizations as "exposed.""Exposed organizations are using AI, but without the governance or frameworks to support it safely," the report says. "What they are doing diverges significantly from what they have in place to manage it."And then there are the "fragmented" entities, 32 percent of respondents, that use AI sometimes, unevenly, and have some governance, but no coherent plan.The two remaining categories, "outpacing" and "pioneer," at 25 percent and 19 percent respectively, describe heavy AI adoption that's ahead of business controls, and AI use in conjunction with structural discipline, respectively.In terms of AI-caused infrastructure incidents, 97 percent of "exposed" organizations reported at least one such snafu. Meanwhile, among "pioneer" entities, 17 percent said they had no AI-related infrastructure incidents.