By the end of 2026, the control plane will become the layer where enterprises prove AI outcomes, and for agent-driven work specifically, interoperability through open standards like MCP and A2A, across the models and tools a customer already runs, rather than depth in any single stack, decides which vendors own it. The deployment-to-value gap is already measurable: GitHub Copilot is deployed at 59% of organizations, yet the plurality of adopters have licensed it to no more than 20% of their developers¹.
Prediction: By the end of 2026, the depth of an enterprise’s observability sets the hard ceiling on how much agent autonomy it will grant, and vendors whose platforms cannot capture the full decision cycle of intent, reasoning, constraints, and outcomes fall behind the market as buyers cap them at low-risk use cases. The demand signal is already in procurement: 37.4% of decision-makers rank AI observability a priority in platform selection, and 30.9% rank AI agent observability specifically, placing both ahead of distributed tracing at 23.7% ².
Prediction: The defining enterprise-technology shift in 2H 2026 is relocation. Adoption is no longer the story. As agentic systems move into operations, production stops being the scarce step. The binding constraint moves to governing, integrating, and verifying work that systems now generate at scale. Value collapses where production used to be the bottleneck and re-pools around the new one. Buying authority follows the value: up toward CIOs who tie technology to business outcomes, and out toward field CTOs and business-unit leaders who hold budget and execution. Vendors repositioning to sell to the CIO are often aiming at the wrong buyer. Vendors selling production acceleration alone are aiming at the wrong layer.
¹ Source: Futurum ETR AI Product Series, January 2026
² Source: 1H 2026 Software Lifecycle Engineering Decision-Maker Survey, Futurum Research, January 2026
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead for the CIO & Technology Buyers and Software Lifecycle Engineering practices at The Futurum Group. A multi-time CIO and CTO with 30+ years leading technical organizations, Mitch built and operated production systems spanning cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Defense, PKI services for the broadband and 5G industries, SaaS platforms, large-scale telecom and banking systems, and a national broadband network. His work with AI began early, developing expert systems that diagnosed and repaired complex mainframe environments. That operator foundation grounds his analysis in operational consequence, covering the technology buyer’s world of software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, cloud, and AI.
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