The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026
The Orchestration Accountability Gap: Inside the SLA Illusion
Session recap · David Gehringer and Aline Gerew
The Bobfather
Bob Schwartz is the CEO of Robert Mark Technologies and has led the company to consistent double-digit growth for the last 10 years. He is an active member of the Workload Automation community and holds a seat on the Broadcom Partner Advisory Committee.
At a Glance:
- 84% are fairly confident they can meet their SLAs, yet 57% miss orchestration deadlines monthly or more.
- 92% say finding the cause of a typical orchestration issue takes an hour or more.
- Only 54% say all their complex processes, AI agents included, have proper audit trails.
- David Gehringer’s diagnosis: the missing piece is visibility, and AI doesn’t magically solve it.
Session recap · The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026
New Research: The Orchestration Accountability Gap
David Gehringer, Principal, Dimensional Research
Aline Gerew, Head of Automation, Agile Operations Division, Broadcom
84% of teams feel fairly confident they’ll meet their SLAs. 57% miss orchestration deadlines monthly or more. Both numbers came from the same survey.
How can both be true? That’s the orchestration accountability gap, the subject of New Research: The Orchestration Accountability Gap at The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026, which Broadcom co-presented with Google Cloud on September 24. Aline Gerew of Broadcom interviewed David Gehringer of Dimensional Research. Here’s the short version.
Fairly confident
84%
say they can meet their business-process SLAs
Missing deadlines
57%
miss orchestration deadlines monthly or more
Root cause
92%
need an hour or more to find the cause of a typical issue
Who They Asked
Dimensional Research, a firm David said has been around about 17 years, sourced the 500 participants itself for this Broadcom-sponsored survey. David described them as a random selection of people at enterprises worldwide, not Broadcom customers, from frontline practitioners to executives. The aim: see whether orchestration has matured since COVID sped it up, and how AI is changing things.
The session covered just a slice. Aline pointed viewers to the Virtual Summit Resource Center for the full report.
Where the Orchestration Accountability Gap Starts
Good news first: 84% are fairly confident they can meet their business-process SLAs.
Now the twist. David said almost 60% of companies miss orchestration deadlines monthly or more (the slide said 57%), and about 26%, a quarter of them, miss deadlines at least weekly. David called it a conundrum.
Aline wasn’t surprised. The data reveals “a disconnect between perception and operational reality,” Aline said, and the downstream impact on the business can be substantial.
How Teams Track Their Deadlines
How do teams know they’re on time? SLA tools came first at 65%. David thought that was low. Shouldn’t monitoring tools be closer to 95% by now?
Second place surprised David more: manual processes, at 64%. That might be your first clue, David said. If you check by hand and don’t catch a miss, you never knew it happened.
Historical information came third at 55%, which David called a little scary. It worked yesterday, so it’ll work today, right?
An Hour or More Just to Find the Cause
52% say more than half of their root-cause analysis is manual. David called that “a bit of an oddity,” since the whole point of orchestration is automation.
Is manual fine because it only takes five minutes? The survey says otherwise. 92% said finding the cause of a typical orchestration issue takes at least an hour, and about 45% need four hours or more.
That’s only diagnosis. The fix comes after, David noted, and the business process still hasn’t finished. David’s math: if this happens weekly at four to five hours a time, you’re chewing through resources fast.
Aline hears the same from IT leaders: skilled engineers losing hours to manual troubleshooting, and fragmented tools with no single pane of glass pushing teams toward gut feel or ad hoc processes.
Visibility Is the Missing Piece
92% said a tool with visibility across all their orchestration tools would reduce issues. David pointed out that results above 90% aren’t common in research. David’s read: one of the biggest culprits isn’t expertise, knowledge or failing tools. It’s visibility into what to monitor, where to look first and how to fix it.
It’s not for lack of tools. The key-findings slide showed 97% use more than one orchestration tool and 60% use four or more. More tools, David said, doesn’t mean more visibility, just more points in time and no end-to-end view.
The Audit-Trail Gap
Do all your complex processes, AI agents included, have proper audit trails? Only 54% said yes. David’s takeaway: half the market doesn’t.
Not wanting to fearmonger, David walked through the consequences. The survey slide showed 89% reporting that audit problems had led to security, data privacy or governance issues. The top four: security (41%), data privacy (35%), failed governance (34%) and customer issues (32%). Legal issues showed up too (18%).
Security, privacy and customer impact together, David said, make a trifecta of bad business. Aline added that fast-growing decentralized automation and AI agents are creating a critical security and governance blind spot.
Three Findings and a Warning About AI
David summed up the survey in three key findings:
- The visibility crisis. Lots of tools, no end-to-end view.
- The SLA illusion. Without visibility, teams believe they’re hitting SLAs until real reporting says otherwise.
- The automation accountability gap. It touches governance and compliance, and puts customers, security and data privacy at risk.
What stuck with me: when you can’t see the whole process, no news feels like good news.
Then the warning: “AI, by the way, doesn’t magically solve this.” David said other Dimensional Research work shows AI adds another layer of obscurity, so the SLA illusion won’t fade without directed effort. The closing slide said it plainly: today’s accountability gap is tomorrow’s AI governance issue.
Aline’s prescription: IT executives need to shift from siloed orchestration tools to a unified control plane with end-to-end visibility and automated tracking. For how Automation by Broadcom can help, Aline pointed ahead to Rajeev Kumar’s session, which we recap in what shipped and what’s next in Broadcom’s automation roadmap. Next up in the summit were Caroline Denoon-Slater on AI agent governance and Jon Hiett on the illusion of green.
What This Means for You
Try the survey’s questions on your own shop.
- How many orchestration deadlines did you miss last month, and how do you know?
- How long does your team need just to find the cause of a typical failure?
- Do all your complex processes, AI agents included, leave a proper audit trail?
If any answer starts with it depends, look closer before you add more AI.
RMT has spent 25 years helping teams run Broadcom workload automation, including Automic and AutoSys. So, how big is your gap? Book a free 30-minute assessment and we’ll look at where your deadlines, troubleshooting time and audit trails stand: robertmarktech.com/lets-talk-rmt.
How big is your gap?
RMT helps teams see where they stand on deadlines, troubleshooting time and audit trails, and what to fix first.
More from the summit
The Next Horizon: Automation Virtual Summit 2026, session by session
- Why AI Projects Fail: Sol Rashidi on the Human Advantage
- MCP Server Security: Agentic AI Without the Chaos
- Intelligent Control Plane in Practice: 4 Automic Automation Use Cases
- Evertec’s VM Rightsizing Automation: From Manual Tickets to One Automic Workflow
- The Orchestration Accountability Gap: Inside the SLA Illusion (you’re here)
- From Black Box to Glass Box: A Blueprint for AI Agent Governance
- The Illusion of Green: Automation Observability Beyond the Return Code
- Broadcom Automation Roadmap: What Shipped and What’s Next