Why AI Is Driving The Next Wave Of Automation For Australian Organisations

In 2026, organisations will double down on infrastructure automation, while expanding their horizons with AI automation.

Embracing automation has long been seen as valuable in IT operational domains.

The technology enables organisations to stretch limited IT budgets and resources further, by removing some of the most high-touch and manually intensive infrastructure management tasks from being performed by personnel – allowing them to focus on higher-order tasks, and invest their time contributing to new projects and innovation.

Adoption of infrastructure automation reached a critical mass in the past year, with the technology set to become even more embedded into IT operations over the course of 2026. Now, organisations are finding they can further increase value and improve outcomes using AI automation – with AI able to shoulder an increased amount of work and responsibility. It’s worth unpacking how we got here – and what it means for organisations as a new year comes into view.

The difference a year makes

This time last year, it was clear that automation would have a major impact across IT infrastructure domains. I predicted a few different areas where the influence of automation would really be felt: aiding virtual machine migrations from VMware to another hypervisor; detecting events or security flaws and taking appropriate automated actions to reduce disruption and maintain availability; and improving the manageability of remote and ‘edge’ based infrastructure. This came true, and then some.

A key factor that drove increased adoption of IT infrastructure automation was the ‘platformisation’ of automation technology. This was a big change. Automation had, until then, been fragmented, with every vendor ecosystem having its own automation tool. This meant organisations amassed a number of tools that each required specialised knowledge and skills to run.

The ability to consolidate all of that into a single tool, or to orchestrate all the existing tools from a single pane of glass, made automation more manageable, with benefits easier to obtain across a range of infrastructure domains. Using this with our own infrastructure managed services meant that all our customers could access automation, and the manageability of these environments became a lot simpler.

All these things came true in 2025: but in reality, we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what infrastructure automation can achieve.

We would expect automations to produce exponential value in infrastructure environments over the next year, with the technology incorporated more deeply in driving operational processes and excellence. All aspects of backend infrastructure operations are in line to be automated to some degree.

Expect big things in cyber incident recovery

One infrastructure-adjacent area we expect automation to really make its mark in 2026 is to improve the mean-time-to-recovery for organisations that experience cyber incidents.

Malware infections such as ransomware continue to cause problems for organisations, including in Australia. Recovery of production systems is still often a painful process, taking weeks or months, and many victims ultimately end up restoring from backup on clean or new infrastructure. The more these recovery procedures can be automated, the more organisations can speed up recovery and resume normal operations.

We also predict a greater degree of automated checking of the backups themselves before attempting restores. According to research, 94% of organisations hit by ransomware saw the threat actors attempt to compromise their backups during the attack as well, further reducing the victims’ options. We expect to see greater use of automated process tools around backup processes, checking whether a backup is infected or has potential security ramifications before it can be picked up and used in a restoration process.

So, we anticipate automation really driving a material improvement in the ability of organisations to recover safely and more quickly from cyber incidents in the coming year.

The arrival of AI automation

In addition to more in-depth use of infrastructure automation, there’s a new conversation starting to take shape among leading Australian organisations: and that is how to take advantage of AI automation, particularly as an extra dimension of infrastructure management.

Early adopters of AI already use the technology to some degree to power automations at home or at work. Seemingly, everyone is using conversational interfaces to direct AI to take certain actions on their behalf – and agentic AI can perform even more complex processes end-to-end. OpenAI recently used the example of planning one’s attendance at a wedding, where the agent was tasked with booking travel and organising weather- and occasion-appropriate attire.

AI offers considerable potential in an enterprise context to plan and execute automations in a variety of business systems. In 2026, we expect use of Model Context Protocol (MCP) to increase significantly compared to today. MCP is an open-source standard for connecting and integrating AI tools with a range of existing business systems. Its adoption will ensure that AI becomes much more tightly integrated into the core of business environments.

The effect of this will be material. Last year, I predicted that generative AI would save organisations time creating playbooks – a list of tasks that an automation is to carry out. The bones of a playbook can be created with a single prompt, tweaked by humans and then applied to infrastructure. In 2026, AI won’t just be preparing the playbooks: it’ll be taking the next steps as well, deploying them into the environment and performing the actual automation as well.

This kind of self-managed infrastructure has long been a goal of forward-thinking organisations, and we expect this to become a reality in the next year. Using a specialised AI and automation partner can further speed up the creation and application of these AI-enabled automations.

About the author 

Uros Zajc is a Solutions Architect and Red Hat Practice Lead for Atturra. He has over 15 years of technical experience in architecture, design, deployment and support of data centre infrastructure, cloud, applications and migrations. Uros is an experienced pre-sales solution architect who engages in all aspects of the sales cycle, as well as being a subject matter expert in post-sales deployments.