IDC FutureScape 2026: 10 Predictions for How Agentic AI Will Reshape DevOps and Development

For the past twenty years, software development has revolved around a simple truth: humans write code. DevOps practices emerged to help those humans deliver code faster, automating testing, deployment, and infrastructure. But the fundamental assumption remained unchanged, people were the ones doing the work.

That assumption is about to be overturned.

According to new research from IDC, we are entering a period where software is no longer written solely by humans. Instead, development becomes a partnership between people and autonomous AI agents that can generate code, run tests, fix bugs, and even make decisions about how systems should operate .

This shift is not incremental. It is structural. And for organizations building digital products, understanding what comes next is critical.

Here are the 10 key predictions from IDC's FutureScape 2026 that explain how agentic AI will reshape development and DevOps over the next five years .

Prediction 1: The Rise of Agent Development Lifecycles

By 2028, IDC predicts that 50% of large enterprises will adopt dedicated agent development lifecycles to manage the expected 10x increase in AI agent deployments .

Traditional software development lifecycles are not designed for agents that learn, adapt, and make decisions. New techniques for developing, testing and overseeing agentic systems will be required. This is the idea of agents as dynamic, software-based entities rather than simply frozen code.

Prediction 2: Multi-Agent Orchestration

Once single agents mate together into fleets of multipleagents, coordination is an issue. IDC predicts that by 2029, the difficulty of controlling multi-agent systems will result in an additional 30% increase in spending on AI governance and monitoring tools from companies.

As agents begin to communicate with others, who verifies their fitness to business? Who audits their decisions? Companies will need dedicated teams and platforms to orchestrate these digital workforces.

Prediction 3: Developers Become Orchestrators

Perhaps the most significant shift is in the role of developers themselves. IDC predicts that by 2030, 80% of developers will work alongside autonomous AI agents, pushing human developers toward planning, design, and orchestration roles .

The developer of 2030 spends less time writing syntax and more time defining problems, guiding agents, and reviewing outcomes. The skill of "prompting" and "agent direction" becomes as fundamental as coding itself.

Prediction 4: Vibe Coding Goes Mainstream

You may have heard of "vibe coding"—building software by describing what you want in natural language while AI handles the implementation. IDC predicts that by 2027, 35% of professional developers will use vibe coding platforms to build production applications .

Natural language is becoming a legitimate development interface. But this only works when enterprise governance and quality controls mature alongside the tools.

Prediction 5: Agents Embedded in Every DevOps Pipeline

By 2030, 65% of enterprises will have AI embedded in their systems and processes via open source collaboration AI-based DevOpps/DevSecOps pipelines.

This implies agents become residents in the forever delivery process. They watch the builds, and run security scans to spot anomalies, even rolling back deployments when something doesn’t look right. The pipeline becomes smart and self-healing.

Prediction 6: A Leader Overwhelming Dominance of the Model Industry

There are dozens of models to choose from, and developers face a paradox of choice. IDC forecasts that in 2027, only 5 frontier models will account for 70% of AI use cases.

Consolidation will be driven by developer preference and ecosystem maturity. The market is moving from "many options" to "a few good ones" that integrate deeply into development workflows.

Prediction 7: Most "Self-Built" Agent Projects Will Fail

Here is a sobering prediction: by 2028, 70% of "self-built" agentic AI projects will be abandoned for failing to meet ROI targets .

The reason? Organizations underestimate the cost of governance, operations, and organizational change. Building agents is easy. Running them safely at scale is hard. Companies that treat agentic AI as a platform capability, not a series of experiments, will be the ones that succeed.

Prediction 8: AI Quality Assurance Becomes Mandatory

If agents are making decisions, you need to know they are making good ones. IDC predicts that by 2028, the focus on AI quality assurance will drive adoption of agent testing and lifecycle management tools by at least 30% .

Without quality assurance, agentic DevOps cannot enter production. Testing agents requires new approaches—simulating environments, validating decisions, and measuring outcomes over time.

Prediction 9: Development Speed Increases 400%

For organizations that get this right, the payoff is enormous. IDC predicts that by 2029, enterprises using agentic AI development tools will see their application development and modernization speed increase by 400% .

Four times faster. This is not about cutting corners. It is about automating entire swaths of the development process while humans focus on architecture, requirements, and quality.

Prediction 10: Fine-Tuning Replaces RAG

Finally, IDC predicts that by 2027, fine-tuning will replace retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as the dominant approach for customizing models . This will drive an 80% increase in the use of open-weight models by developers.

As organizations seek deeper control over model behavior, fine-tuning on proprietary data becomes more attractive than stitching together prompts and external knowledge bases.

What This Means for Your Organization

IDC's analyst team offers a clear perspective: the gap between organizations that treat agentic AI as a platform capability and those that run isolated experiments will widen rapidly .

Companies that succeed will do more than adopt coding assistants. They will:

• Establish agent development lifecycles with governance built in
• Invest in multi-agent orchestration and observability
• Help developers transition from "coders" to "orchestrators"
• Build AI quality assurance into every pipeline
• Treat model selection and fine-tuning as strategic decisions

The next five years will be the most transformational in the history of software development . The only question is whether your organization will lead the change or be led by it.