JetBrains Report: CI/CD Pipelines Remain Central to DevOps, AI Integration Growing but Governance Lags

The latest "State of CI/CD in 2026" report by JetBrains underscores the enduring centrality of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines within DevOps workflows. An overwhelming 83.4% of surveyed organizations actively employ CI/CD, surpassing the adoption rates of other key practices like containerization, orchestration, and even Infrastructure as Code (IaC) itself. This indicates that despite the evolution of cloud-native landscapes, the automated delivery of software remains the bedrock of modern development. This continued reliance on CI/CD pipelines is significant for practitioners because it means that investments in optimizing and securing these pipelines will continue to yield substantial returns. The report also sheds light on the increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into CI/CD, with nearly half (48.8%) of organizations using AI for at least one related task. This primarily involves AI assisting with code review, test generation and fixing, and diagnosing build failures. However, a critical finding is the disparity between AI's growing presence and the readiness for its autonomous operation in production. Only 34% of respondents would trust AI agents to make autonomous production changes, with 42% citing the absence of guardrails as their primary blocker. This trend aligns with the broader industry movement towards AI-driven development and operations, where AI is increasingly seen as a force multiplier for engineering teams. Similar to how IaC transformed infrastructure management from manual processes to codified, version-controlled definitions, AI is poised to automate and optimize various stages of the software delivery lifecycle. However, just as IaC required new disciplines around state management and drift detection, AI integration demands robust governance frameworks. The report also notes a surprising resurgence in self-hosting of primary CI/CD systems, with 72.8% of respondents opting for on-premises or self-managed cloud infrastructure. This highlights a persistent need for control over hardware, networks, data, and security, even in an increasingly cloud-first world. In practice, this means that while AI tools can accelerate development and improve quality, practitioners must prioritize the establishment of clear policies, approval workflows, and security protocols for AI-driven changes. Simply adopting AI without adequate governance can introduce new risks, as evidenced by the report's finding that teams using AI report that the volume of generated changes slows reviews and makes reliability difficult to assess. Organizations should focus on incremental AI adoption, starting with assistive roles and gradually moving towards more autonomous functions as trust and governance mature. Furthermore, the continued prevalence of self-hosted CI/CD environments suggests that hybrid cloud strategies and on-premises infrastructure management will remain relevant, requiring IaC solutions that can seamlessly span diverse environments and robust security measures to protect sensitive data and intellectual property.