PagerDuty has published research on AI-first operational resilience in Australia and New Zealand, finding that organisations in the region are outpacing global peers on several resilience measures.
The company surveyed 1,000 business leaders, IT decision makers and senior developers across Australia and New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the United States. In Australia and New Zealand, 80% of organisations reported improved operational resilience over the past year, compared with a global average of 71%.
The findings suggest operational resilience is becoming a broader business issue rather than a narrow technical one. In Australia and New Zealand, 98% of respondents recognised a competitive advantage in reducing incidents and speeding up recovery.
Financial Risk
Major service disruptions continue to carry a high cost for businesses in the region. Around 65% of organisations reported losses of $300,000 or more per hour during major incidents, while 56% cited brand and reputation damage, 54% pointed to lower productivity, and 52% said incidents had a direct effect on revenue.
That last figure was notably above the global result of 41%, suggesting businesses in Australia and New Zealand are more likely than international peers to link technical disruption directly to top-line performance.
Budget plans also show resilience spending is becoming more firmly embedded in corporate planning. Across the region, 84% of organisations said they planned to increase operational resilience budgets over the next 12 months, ahead of the global average of 77%.
The gap between stronger and weaker performers was marked. Among companies identified in the research as revenue-growing businesses, or Revenue Risers, 91% said they were increasing resilience investment, compared with 67% of underperformers.
AI Uptake
The research found that 66% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand are actively incorporating AI into digital operations, compared with 59% globally. It also found that 58% are using generative or agentic AI to automate remediation and recovery workflows.
PagerDuty linked that uptake to stronger operational outcomes. According to the findings, organisations adopting AI reported higher rates of resilience improvement than those that had not yet introduced AI-driven operations.
Expectations for business impact were also higher in the region than elsewhere. More than half of respondents in Australia and New Zealand, 53%, said AI-driven resilience would directly improve customer satisfaction, compared with 39% globally, while 56% expected AI to reduce incidents by at least 20%.
Human Oversight
Despite stronger AI adoption, the research suggests businesses in the region are not moving towards fully automated operational decision-making. Two-thirds of respondents, or 66%, said they planned to maintain a hybrid model in which AI handles repetitive tasks while people retain oversight of critical decisions.
That approach reflects a cautious view of automation in high-stakes environments such as outage response and service recovery, where speed matters but accountability remains with human teams.
The results come as boards and executive teams face growing pressure to reduce downtime and contain the cost of digital disruption. For many large organisations, incident management has moved beyond IT departments because service failures can affect revenue, customer experience and brand standing within hours.
PagerDuty presented a regional picture in which Australia and New Zealand businesses are combining investment in resilience with wider use of AI tools while still keeping human judgment at the centre of sensitive decisions.
“The 2026 PagerDuty State of AI-First Operations Report further demonstrates how the financial risk of major incidents makes operational resilience a board-level priority,” said Katherine Calvert, Chief Marketing Officer, PagerDuty. “AI-first operations enable organisations to accelerate their incident management workflows so they can restore service more quickly during disruption. With PagerDuty, organisations can not only minimise risk, but cut down on teams’ time spent firefighting so they can focus on driving innovation and revenue.”
