The enterprises surveyed for The State of Microsoft Automation 2026 operate more than 45,000 automated scripts and workflows in production. 72% of them do not enforce full governance policies for that automation. The distance between how much these organizations have automated and how consistently they control it runs through every finding in the study.

Between October and December of 2025, ScriptRunner Software GmbH surveyed 180 IT managers and senior system engineers at enterprises with 1,000 or more employees about the state of automation in their organizations. We've assembled the headline findings here so you can compare your own operation against the surveyed cohort. The full State of Microsoft Automation 2026 report contains the complete analysis, cohort breakdowns, and a maturity self-assessment behind the results summarized below.

How the survey was run

The survey collected responses from 180 IT professionals, primarily IT managers and senior system engineers, at enterprises with 1,000 or more employees running Microsoft 365 and Azure environments. Fieldwork ran from October 9 to December 11, 2025, through an online and in-person self-assessment.

Three quarters of respondents work in North America, 17% in EMEA, 6% in APAC, and 2% elsewhere. Together, the organizations represented operate more than 45,000 automated scripts and workflows in production, so these are environments where automation already carries real operational load, built largely on PowerShell, Azure Automation, Power Automate, and Logic Apps.

Because the survey is based on self-assessment, the results describe how respondents evaluate their own automation practices. Percentages may not total 100% in every distribution because of rounding.

Governance: 72% do not enforce full governance policies

Among the enterprises surveyed, 72% do not enforce full governance policies across their automation.

• 28% enforce full governance policies.
• 58% apply partial controls.
• 14% have no governance in place.

The distinction between partial and absent governance is worth pausing on. Only 14% operate without controls altogether. The far more common situation is that policies exist but are not applied to every script, workflow, service account, or execution environment. An organization may require approval for newly created scripts while hundreds of existing scheduled jobs run unreviewed, or maintain a documented role model while shared service-account credentials circulate in practice.

Whether your governance is real becomes clear against a specific operational question. If a script changed permissions last Tuesday, could your team identify who approved it, which credentials it used, when it ran, and what it changed? Where that information lives in email threads, individual consoles, local logs, and one admin's memory, an audit request or an incident investigation turns into archaeology.

Making approval, delegation, credential handling, and audit logging consistent properties of execution, rather than habits individual teams maintain to varying degrees, is the subject of our guide to governance and compliance for PowerShell automation.

Integration: 83% lack full integration across their IT tools

83% of the surveyed organizations lack full integration across their automation environment.

• 17% achieve full integration across ITSM, monitoring, and infrastructure tools.
• 66% have partial integration.
• 17% operate in silos.

Fully isolated tooling is not the common condition. Most organizations have connected some systems while manual handoffs survive in between. A typical partially integrated workflow starts with a monitoring alert. A person copies the hostname into a service ticket. Another person enters the same information into an administrative console, runs the remediation, and manually records the outcome back in the ticket. The remediation itself is automated; the process around it is not.

Each handoff adds delay and another chance for incomplete or incorrect information to enter the workflow. It also scatters execution data across systems, which makes end-to-end reporting harder than it should be. Our API integration strategy for enterprise workflows covers how to connect alerts, tickets, automation engines, and infrastructure without treating every integration as its own project.

Adoption: 39% have automated most repetitive tasks

39% of the surveyed organizations report having automated most repetitive tasks.

• 39% have automated most repetitive tasks.
• 33% describe their automation as partial.
• 28% still rely heavily on manual processes.

The typical enterprise has moved past isolated experiments without reaching broad coverage. Partial adoption usually means uneven adoption: password resets are automated while onboarding remains a manual checklist, or one infrastructure team has standardized provisioning while another copies configurations by hand.

For the organizations reporting the most automation, the operating question changes. As workflow counts grow, automation needs named owners, shared standards, and controlled execution rather than individual scripting skill. That difference, between scripts that solve individual problems and automation managed as an operational capability, is what our guide to enterprise PowerShell automation for Microsoft IT works through in detail.

Visibility: 63% have only a rough idea of their automation potential

63% of the surveyed organizations have only a rough idea of what they could automate next.

• 31% actively identify automation candidates and then automate those processes.
• 63% have only a rough idea of their automation potential.
• 6% lack visibility into possible automations entirely.

Without a current view of automation opportunities, candidates live in an engineer's working notes or an outdated spreadsheet, and priorities follow the loudest request rather than process volume, operational risk, or potential time savings. Organizations that actively identify opportunities can treat the automation backlog as an operating artifact: reviewed, ranked, and connected to capacity planning and service objectives.

The practical test is whether your organization has a repeatable way to find and compare automation candidates. Without one, there is no way to tell whether automation investment is going where it earns the most.

Four more patterns from the data

The survey covered eight areas in total. The remaining four show the same shape in brief.

Self-service: 47% report that self-service automation exists but is not actively used. The execution behind a request is often already automated; users keep opening tickets anyway when the portal is hard to find, insufficiently trusted, or less convenient than the service desk. What it takes to close that adoption gap is covered in our look at safe zero-touch provisioning.

Deployment speed: 41% can build a new workflow within hours using low-code tools, 34% need days, and 25% need weeks and depend on developer availability. Where delivery takes weeks, automation requests compete with development backlogs, and smaller operational improvements get postponed or simply done by hand.

Democratization: 63% allow non-developers to contribute to automation with IT support, the most common model in the survey, while 19% let power users build independently and 19% restrict creation to developers. The open question in supported models is where contribution ends and operational control begins: who approves a workflow for production, which credentials it can touch, and who owns it once it runs.

Roadmaps: 30% have a defined automation roadmap, 40% work from informal plans, and 30% automate ad hoc. Informal plans hold up while a small group shares the same priorities, and become unreliable when responsibilities change or investment decisions need to be defended. Why platform strategy belongs on that roadmap is the subject of our piece on consolidation as a strategy.

What the findings describe

Almost no organization in the survey has nothing, and almost none is finished. The middle categories dominate every distribution: 58% apply partial governance controls, 66% have partial integration, 63% have only a rough idea of their automation potential, 40% run on informal plans, and 47% have self-service capabilities sitting unused.

These intermediate states represent real progress. They also create a specific kind of exposure: automation the organization depends on daily but cannot fully account for. The scripts run, the workflows execute, and the answers to who approved what, under which identity, with which credentials, get harder to produce every quarter.

Three questions can locate your organization in these distributions:

1. Could your team produce, within one business day, a list of every automated job that ran with elevated privileges last week?
2. If a department requested a new workflow tomorrow, would delivery be measured in hours, days, or development sprints?
3. Is your self-service catalog handling a growing share of eligible requests, or do users still default to the service desk?

Easy answers to all three put you in the leading cohort. Difficulty with any of them puts you in the majority.

Get the full report

This post covers the headline distributions from The State of Microsoft Automation 2026. The complete report adds the full analysis behind each finding, cohort breakdowns, and a maturity self-assessment you can use to score your own automation practices against the surveyed enterprises. It also examines what the organizations furthest along do differently on execution, identity, and auditing, and what changed for them operationally as a result.

The survey shows where the market stands. The report is built to show where you stand relative to it.

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