Our service management predictions for 2026
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Our service management predictions for 2026
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Published on 5 January 2026
10 min read
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Published on 5 January 2026
10 min read
Adaptavist’s take on the future of service delivery, integrating insights across ITSM, ESM, CX, and enterprise operations
As 2025 comes to a close, our experts have been looking ahead at how service management will evolve over the next year. They’ve provided insights and predictions to prepare you for the shifts and trends that might dominate the landscape in 2026. But first, a little reflection…
The year of experimentation
The last 12 months have been a year of pilots, where organisations finally moved from talking about modernisation to testing it. From AI and CMDB/Asset refreshes to workflow modernisation and platform consolidation, it’s been a period of low-risk experimentation where organisations built the foundations needed to scale meaningful service transformations.
Everyone’s a customer
Meanwhile, organisations have been trying to keep pace with customer expectations. The line between customer support and internal service management has continued to blur. All end users expect consumer-grade experiences all the time. We’re seeing a more unified view of service experience as a result. Every service interaction, whether HR, IT, finance, customer support, legal, or facilities contributes to a perception of your organisation’s competence.
So what’s next?
As we move into 2026, we’re seeing a shift from managing discrete services to coordinating an integrated ecosystem of intelligent capabilities. That might involve fusing AI, automation, and workflow intelligence into a single service offering that proactively resolves issues and learns as it goes. Equally important is using data-driven service intelligence to predict demand, surface risks early, and guide capacity planning and investment decisions.
Let’s take a closer look at the top six developments we can expect to dominate next year.
Trend 1: Data-driven service intelligence becomes continuous and predictive
Organisations are moving from traditional dashboarding to continuous service intelligence. As this happens, we’ll see predictive insights, dependency mapping, and automated pattern detection become critical. AI-driven insight will be grounded in real-time data, forecasting, and orchestration, meaning tools will be able to surface issues before they impact users. This trend is all about moving towards a proactive (rather than reactive) approach to operations, transforming this resilience into a measurable business capability (see trend 5).
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents. That’s up from less than 5% in 2025.
“As organizations accelerate digital transformation, agentic AI in enterprise applications will move beyond individual productivity, setting new standards for teamwork and workflow through smarter human-agent interactions.” (Source: Gartner)
Gartner also highlights the rise of “AI-supercomputing platforms” as a core 2026 trend. These are systems that tackle data-intensive workloads for machine learning, simulation, and analytics, thanks to powerful processors, specialised hardware, and massive amounts of memory. This signals that organisations are preparing to bake AI tools, data, and analytics more deeply into their applications.
Trend 2: A more experience-centric service across the enterprise
With AI taking care of so many interactions, there’s never been a sharper focus on the human experience. Service management success can be directly linked to how people feel about their interactions with a business (both internally and externally). A consistent, universal experience across the organisation is key here, as are the opportunities for conversational, contextual, and personalised communication especially during self-service interactions.
We expect to see service journeys become experience-designed, not ticket-centred. As technology shifts away from “support processes” to actually shaping behaviour and experience for our customers. Forrester has recognised the shift from “surface-level engagement to meaningful connection”, saying that savvy leaders will need to “recalibrate their strategies as buyers demand proof and consumers seek authenticity.”
According to Giva for service management, this means happier customers and longer-lasting relationships, more valuable work for people while AI agents get on with all the routine stuff, and a better reputation for the business – great experiences equals higher satisfaction scores and stronger word-of-mouth support.
Services should evolve beyond rigid frameworks. They should be built on trust, designed for people, and focused on real human experience.
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Head of Service Management, Adaptavist
Trend 3: Tool consolidation and the rise of unified service operating models
We’ve reached peak tool sprawl. And it’s becoming unsustainable. That’s why in 2026, many organisations will embark on major unification efforts. We’ll see businesses adopting centralised service platforms that share taxonomies, workflow engines, automation layers, service catalogues, and knowledge systems. This will lead to a more consistent approach to data, processes, and experience. Keep in mind, this isn’t so much about cost-cutting as it is about strategic coherence.
Gartner’s list of 2026 strategic trends (from AI-native development platforms to domain-specific language models) supports the move towards a new operating model – a unified platform that combines compute, data, AI, security, and orchestration all in one place. While monday.com (a business built on this type of model) reinforces the idea that platform consolidation and enterprise-wide unified service operation models are the way forward.
The market is moving toward platform consolidation, as companies recognise that only a unified, orchestrated ecosystem can support AI-driven service delivery, reduce complexity, and strengthen operational resilience.
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Head of Service Management, Adaptavist
Trend 4: AI-orchestrated workflows redefine service delivery
In 2026, AI will become the operational backbone of service delivery, orchestrating work across IT, operations, HR, finance, and customer teams. Instead of simply assisting agents, AI will perform triage, routing, resolution, and continuous knowledge creation as an integrated layer across the enterprise.
And the tide is turning on chatbot-based support, with their decline expected next year.
The emergence of agentic AI is the natural next step. It executes multi-step service work autonomously, escalating only when human judgment is required. AI agents are capable of diagnosing root causes, applying fixes, and resolving tickets. Which means as automation scales, we’ll see service leaders shift toward defining guardrails, governance, and risk controls rather than managing queues.
In fact, Gartner predicts that:
“Through 2027, GenAI and AI agent use will create the first true challenge to mainstream productivity tools in 30 years, prompting a $58 billion market shakeup.”
With this shift looming, AI literacy looks set to become a mandatory leadership skill, and organisations that lack governance maturity will struggle to safely operationalise intelligent workflows.
Trend 5: Resilience as a board-level KPI
We expect resilience to become a front-page metric in 2026 as incidents grow more visible, costly, and interconnected across digital ecosystems. Outages now affect customers, employees, revenue, and reputation simultaneously, forcing executives to elevate resilience alongside financial performance, risk, and satisfaction.
Be prepared to embrace cross-team orchestration – uniting IT, SRE, customer support, and product – essential for rapid recovery and transparency. Organisations will also shift from SLA-driven uptime reporting to a holistic view of service health, incorporating dependencies, user impact, and predictive signals. Meanwhile, continuous learning loops and resilience engineering will emerge as core capabilities.
The wider impact of this will be boards increasingly demanding proof that resilience is designed in, not patched on, making it a true enterprise KPI.
Resilience is shifting from an operational afterthought to a strategic mandate, redefining how organisations measure service health in an era where outages affect customers, revenue, and reputation in real time.
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Head of Service Management, Adaptavist
Trend 6: The rise of service designers, workflow architects & AI governance roles
As automation absorbs repetitive tasks, your service teams will evolve into cross-functional design studios focused on crafting intelligent, end-to-end service experiences.
High-value human work shifts toward service journey design, workflow architecture, knowledge strategy, experience mapping, and AI governance. As a result, we should see new roles emerge too, overseeing model behaviour, data ethics, and decision boundaries.
Organisations will discover that scaling AI requires just as much human design as technical capability, fuelling demand for people who can translate business intent into orchestrated workflows. This means 2026 will become a turning point in talent strategy: service organisations must rethink the skills they hire for, moving from process operators to experience and governance architects.
AI and automation are elevating service teams into strategic design and governance roles, where human expertise defines service journeys, orchestrates enterprise workflows, and ensures responsible automation at scale.
Nikos Georgakopoulos
Head of Service Management, Adaptavist
Service management as strategic infrastructure
This is the year service management will evolve to become more intelligent, unified, and experience-led – and a strategic part of your wider infrastructure. It’s vital that organisations reinvent their service architectures to keep up with developments. You must uplift your teams – recognising and resurfacing the importance of human insight; consolidate platforms for a more centralised, consistent approach; and embrace AI-driven resilience from the top down.
Knowing what to do next means knowing where you’re at and planning for the future. Our service management maturity assessment service lets you get a handle on your current landscape and then build a 2026 roadmap to modernise your service operating models, deploy unified workflow and service intelligence capabilities, and prepare your teams for AI-centric service delivery.
Ready to build that roadmap?
Get in touch with our experts today.
Written by
Head of Service Management Strategic Advisors
Nikos boasts nearly two decade's experience within IT, holding a bachelor’s in computer science, a master’s in business administration, and experience with the Atlassian ecosystem. This equips him to effectively solve problems and enhance productivity of organisations within regulated industries.