For the last several years, automation and AI dominated enterprise roadmaps. Organizations poured money into Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), ECM modernization, robotic process automation (RPA), and digital workflows with the hope of transforming operations.
But by the end of 2025, one reality became unavoidable:
Automation only creates value when it runs reliably. Hype doesn’t move work forward—uptime does.
Across industries—from insurance and financial services to the public sector and healthcare—organizations learned a hard truth:
AI cannot deliver ROI if the underlying content and document processes fail, stall, or degrade.
As we approach 2026, a new priority is emerging. This year won’t be about “more automation.”
It will be about operationalizing automation through observability, transparency, and measurable service performance.
This is where Reveille’s Service Level Assurance platform becomes essential.
2025 Was the Turning Point: Enterprises Got Serious About Reliability
In 2025, we saw a shift across our customer base and the broader market:
1. Automation Downtime Became a Board-Level Concern
When an IDP workflow slows down or an ECM connector breaks, the business feels it instantly:
- Slower claims
- Delayed onboarding
- Missed SLAs
- Backlogs in citizen services
- Overtime and rework costs
Gartner noted that over 40% of automation initiatives fail to scale due to operational visibility gaps and unreliability.
Organizations began measuring downtime in dollars, not minutes.
2. AI Projects Stalled Because Operations Teams Lacked Visibility
AI-based IDP platforms performed incredibly well—until they didn’t.
Most outages weren’t caused by ABBYY, Kofax, or OpenText engines themselves, but by:
- API bottlenecks
- Queue backlogs
- Misconfigured connectors
- Infrastructure limits
- Upstream ECM issues
We covered this in our blog on Document AI Reliability and saw the same pattern with OnBase, FileNet, and Documentum workflows.
3. Platform Owners Reported Rising Complexity
Hybrid cloud, remote work, content sprawl, and dozens of automation tools created a mess of dependencies.
Even teams with deep platform expertise told us:
“We can’t fix what we can’t see.”
This drove interest in observability for OnBase, ABBYY monitoring, and cross-platform insights that traditional infrastructure monitoring couldn’t provide.
2026 Will Be the Year Automation Gets Judged on Reliability
Organizations are shifting from experimenting with AI to operationalizing it.
The priority now is making sure every automated process meets service level expectations.
Here are the reliability-driven trends that will define 2026.
Trend 1: Reliability Becomes the Primary ROI Metric for Automation
Enterprises have realized that automation ROI is unlocked only when workflows stay:
- available
- accurate
- compliant
- performant
Downtime is expensive and increasingly unacceptable.
In our recent financial services success story, the customer achieved $200K in annual savings because Reveille reduced outages and eliminated manual troubleshooting.
2026 budgets will prioritize:
- SLA enforcement
- Predictable processing
- Stability and throughput
- Automated diagnosis of failure conditions
Not more bots.
Trend 2: Automation Will Require Observability to Receive Funding
CIOs and CFOs are tightening standards.
No more pilots without measurable operational controls.
Agencies like the U.S. Digital Service and OMB have already published guidance on reliability and modernization frameworks for digital services (digital.gov). We expect these standards to become widespread.
Executives will ask:
- “How do we know this automation won’t fail?”
- “How will we track service-level impact?”
- “Do we have cross-platform insight?”
Reveille becomes the answer, providing real-time health, diagnostics, and SLA insights for:
- ABBYY Vantage & FlexiCapture
- Hyland OnBase
- OpenText Documentum/xECM
- IBM FileNet, Datacap & CMOD
- Microsoft 365 content workflows
Trend 3: “Know Before Users Know” Moves From Dream to Requirement
Performance degradations often begin hours before end users notice.
By the time tickets appear, the backlog is already growing.
Reveille’s AI-powered dynamic thresholding and predictive baselines are reshaping how teams respond.
This is a step beyond traditional monitoring—it’s true observability for document-centric automation.
Related reading:
👉 Reveille AI + Dynamic Thresholds Explained
Trend 4: Cross-Platform Visibility Will Become Mandatory in a Fragmented Automation Ecosystem
IDP platforms don’t operate alone.
They connect to:
- ECM repositories
- Case management systems
- RPA workflows
- Cloud storage
- APIs
- Databases
If one system slows down, everything slows down.
Our blog on Unified ECM/IDP Observability explains how these blind spots form.
In 2026, organizations will require a single view into:
- document throughput
- OCR engine health
- ECM connection stability
- RPA task flows
- user activity patterns
- content object performance
Trend 5: MSPs Will Adopt Observability as a Standard Offering
Managed service providers supporting platforms like OnBase, ABBYY, Documentum, M365, and FileNet are under pressure to deliver:
- uptime guarantees
- client reporting
- proactive issue resolution
- SLA-driven support tiers
That’s why Reveille SENTRY was built—to give MSPs:
- out-of-the-box dashboards
- automated alerting
- billing and license usage reporting
- client-facing transparency
MSPs who adopt observability will win more service contracts in 2026.
Those who don’t will be left behind.
What This Means for 2026: Automation Leaders Will Demand Assurance, Not Just Insight
2026 is shaping up to be the first year where automation success will be defined by:
- continuous uptime
- operational transparency
- service level assurance
- predictability
- audit readiness
This is the space where Reveille leads the industry.
If 2025 was the year organizations experimented with automation,
2026 will be the year they insist it runs flawlessly.
Ready to Make Automation Reliable in 2026?
Reveille helps organizations proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before users feel the impact—delivering the reliability AI and automation workflows demand.
