Perforce's 2026 Platform Engineering Report Finds Platform Engineering Maturity Separates AI Advantage from Instability

MINNEAPOLIS, July 8, 2026— Perforce Software, the modern DevOps Tech Stack that ensures AI control, announced the findings of its latest State of DevOps Report: Platform Engineering 2026, which surveyed 820 technology professionals worldwide. The report examines the role platform engineering practices play with AI maturation and adoption across organizations. Findings reveal 73% of mature platform engineering organizations say platform maturity was a critical or significant factor in AI success, compared to 44% of less mature organizations.

As AI goes from experimental to production-ready, many organizations are still working to translate early productivity gains into durable operational value. While 66% of organizations are using AI in infrastructure workflows, only 31% report fully autonomous AI, highlighting that many are still in the early stages of operationalizing AI at scale.

Challenges persist around visibility, traceability, and control of AI within enterprises and highly regulated industries. As AI adoption accelerates, platform engineering teams are becoming central to balancing speed with control. Organizations with formal governance report 94% trust in AI, compared with just 51% relying on ad hoc approaches, underscoring how structured, platform-driven governance is essential to scaling AI safely. By encoding policy, automating governance, and standardizing workflows, platform teams help enterprises move faster without sacrificing control.

Platform Engineering Strengthens Governance and AI Trust

The report shows a strong correlation between platform engineering maturity and governance outcomes, positioning platform teams as critical enablers of responsible AI adoption:

• 79% of platform-mature organizations report strong governance automation maturity, compared to just 14% of immature organizations.
• 81% express high confidence in AI outputs in critical workflows, versus 48% of less mature organizations.
• Organizations with fully standardized internal developer platforms (IDPs) reach 92% confidence in AI outputs.

"The data underscores that trust in AI is not accidental. It is engineered through governance, automation, and standardized workflows," said Ron Hoffner, VP of Product Management. "AI just made the consequences of ignoring them impossible to hide. Companies that operate with real engineering rigor in their AI work will pull away from the pack."

Internal Developer Platforms Drive Automation at Scale

Organizations that invest in fully standardized internal developer platforms are further ahead in operationalizing both AI and governance:

• 44% of IDP-mature organizations run AI workflows fully autonomously, compared to 26% of organizations using AI experimentally.
• 52% of organizations have fully automated audit trails, with similar gains across policy-as-code and compliance reporting.

These standardized platforms allow teams to embed governance into workflows, ensuring consistency and traceability as AI-driven changes accelerate infrastructure operations.

Additional Findings Reveal:

• 66% of organizations are already using AI in infrastructure and configuration workflows, including provisioning, drift detection, and compliance management.
• Mature organizations are nearly 2x more likely to run AI workflows autonomously compared to those still experimenting.

The full State of Platform Engineering Report 2026 is available now. The report is a subset of data collected for the State of DevOps Report 2026, which has been published annually since 2013. Since then, thousands of DevOps professionals worldwide have contributed to this report, which examines the global trends, priorities, and concerns impacting DevOps and Platform Engineering adoption.

About Perforce

Perforce delivers a DevOps Tech Stack for teams building and running high-stakes software systems and revenue-critical applications, where failure is not an option. As a trusted partner helping organizations govern software delivery for AI, Perforce solutions enforce guardrails across code, quality, infrastructure, and data—enabling innovation without introducing risk. With customers in over 80 countries—including more than 75% of the Fortune 100 and 50% of the Global 500—Perforce is trusted by the world's most innovative teams to build, test, secure, and deliver critical software at scale.