New Relic surveyed 2,575 engineering leaders and found that AI has become the top driver of observability demand—but it's creating a dangerous gap. Teams are shipping AI-generated code faster than they can monitor it, leading to more production incidents even as code reviews look good on paper.

• One in four organizations deploy AI agents in production with zero monitoring, creating unmitigated operational risk when autonomous systems alter code, configs, or infrastructure without visibility.
• 62% of teams ship AI-generated code without manual line-by-line verification; 78% report more production incidents and 86% see senior engineers spending extra time fixing code, despite 94% rating the code quality high during review.
• Tool sprawl is reversing years of consolidation—organizations now use multiple AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot at 49.7%, Gemini at 40.7%, Codex at 36.6%) that generate code in incompatible formats, making source-code review unreliable and runtime observability the only trustworthy signal.