Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly survey of the platform engineering landscape. Every week, we zoom into another spot in the platform engineering universe, from best practices to community updates and more.
Plus… Google’s bringing its agentic enterprise platform event to London & Paris.
The State of AI in Platform Engineering is revealed.
How do you condense the impact of the fastest adoption of a new technology in history into one report?
The first draft of the State of AI in Platform Engineering Volume 2 was 25,000 words. We went deep on every topic you can imagine, from regulation to observability, to security and agent control planes, and more and more and more. But if you say everything, you say nothing.
So, we condensed the AI & platform engineering universe to five core questions:
What are platform engineers doing with AI?
Is the industry achieving ROI?
What are the fundamental challenges facing platform teams?
Why are some organizations achieving 10x the results of others?
What can we expect from the future?
The report answers all of them.
What are platform engineers doing with AI?
Last year, we defined the AI implementation plateau, the stage where organizations stop seeing rapid gains from AI adoption and face slower ROI, integration hurdles, and the need for actual cultural or organizational change.
What we saw was that, though basically everybody was using AI, they were overwhelmingly just using it for generating code, writing docs, and sending emails. And that meant that most teams very quickly plateaued from the crazy, exciting gains they saw in the first months (and expected to continue), as basic chatbot usage didn’t really deliver the Day 2 ROI they were hoping for.
But things are changing fast. Code Gen and Docs might still be #1 and #2, but more complex use cases like IaC generation and log analysis and debugging, and data analysis have massively increased in the last 12 months.
Is the industry achieving ROI?
Technically… yes. But not really in any way to write home about. 1/3 report either incremental efficiency gains or operational savings; another 1/3 are still in their experimentation phase, while 14% are seeing negative gains. The outlier? And the position we all want to be in… 8% are seeing transformational ROI.
These numbers, at face value, don’t seem particularly inspiring. Remember, it was only last year that MIT reported 95% of AI pilots saw zero ROI. Our data is pointing in the same direction.
The industry is maturing. Teams are seeing value. And some teams are operating at a level that would have been impossible to imagine just a few short years ago.
What are those teams doing?
Why are some organizations achieving 10x the results of others?
If you’re a long-time reader of our reports, it’ll probably not come as any surprise to you. The winning teams are increasingly the ones with the better platform, not the better access to models or higher AI adoption. And not just a platform for developers using AI.
They evolve their IDP into an Agentic Engineering Platform to serve agents as a first-class user. That means governing their identity, their spend, and enabling them to work autonomously to deliver insane business value.
And the industry gets it too. When asked what’s the main thing stopping your team from scaling AI? 27% of you said platform capabilities. And only 1 in 10 named the model.
Isn’t it great when the data proves what we’ve all known?;)
And all this is just the beginning. In the full report, we break down the four levels of agentic development, what your platform should look like, our predictions for the future, the main challenges facing teams, how to break through them, and so much more.
Download the full report and get it all!
As always… stay crunchy 🥐
Quick bites
Highlight of the week
Google is taking its Day 0 to day 100: building the agentic enterprise with GKE event on the road this September, with stops in Paris Sep 28 and London Sep 30. If the question keeping you up at night is less “can we build an agent” and more “where does it actually live once it’s running,” this one’s for you.
From the community
Every PlatformCon talk, past and present, is on the Platform Engineering YouTube channel
Looking forward to the full report. ROI is hard here because a lot of the value shows up as work that did not happen.