AI In Operations: Teams Are Leading The Way, UpKeep's survey of 518 maintenance and operations professionals, shows operations leaders have an opportunity to work with the front lines and make AI a standard part of how the operation runs and grows efficiently

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- UpKeep, the leading mobile-first Asset Operations Management platform, today released AI In Operations: Teams Are Leading The Way, an original research report on how maintenance and operations teams are adopting AI. Of the professionals surveyed, 67.8% use AI at least occasionally, and 55.4% work at an organization with no AI in place in maintenance or operations. More than a quarter (27.8%) are in both groups.

The gap is widest at the leadership level. Directors and VPs of Operations are the most likely to say their concern about falling behind on AI grew over the past year (56.0%, compared with 29.7% of all respondents). They are also the least likely to work somewhere that uses AI regularly in day-to-day work (13.7%, compared with 27.4% overall).

"Most maintenance operations run on software chosen years or even decades ago, and replacing it used to cost more than living with its gaps, so teams learned to work around the inefficiency," said Ryan Chan, CEO and founder of UpKeep. "AI changed that math and change is happening at every level of the org. The fastest start is to ask the team what they already use AI for, and build into systems the whole operation can see and measure."

Key Findings

• Efficiency outweighs outside pressure. 42.9% of respondents name working more efficiently as the single biggest driver of AI adoption. Competitors, leadership mandates, customer and auditor expectations, and regulation together account for 15.3%. On all five pressures measured, "no change" over the past year was the most common answer, chosen by 55.1% to 72.9% of respondents.
• Paperwork comes first. 43.1% say paperwork is where AI would help most, including writing up work orders, finding information in manuals and past records, and reporting to leadership. Only 13.7% choose diagnosing equipment. Paperwork leads in every role and every industry surveyed.
• Teams still bend to their software. 69.3% say their team changes its process to fit its software at least sometimes. Only 11.0% say the software adapts to them.
• Supervisors are leading the builds. One in ten respondents has built a working app in UpKeep Nova, and 40.4% of those builders are maintenance supervisors or managers. Half of builders (50.0%) would have kept doing the work by hand without the app, and another 8.7% say it never would have been built.

"When AI use grows one person at a time, the time saved stays with that person, and the work they produce sits outside the systems the operation depends on," said Nachiket Shiralkar, CTO of UpKeep. "We're building a platform the whole organization can manage, where apps run on real asset and work order data with the oversight IT expects. The people closest to the work know where AI helps, and they need a governed place to build."

From a Parts Drawer to a Working Tool

The report includes a case study of Axon Enterprise, which runs eight robotic production lines at its facility. Technicians searching for small components used to dig through parts drawers while comparing parts to a photo on their phone, and the parts they pulled didn't always make it onto the work order. Joshua Stewart, Inventory Supervisor at Axon, spent about a year and a half building a tool he named Dewey. A technician places a part under a camera, and Dewey identifies it and gives its exact drawer and slot.

A Rollout Plan Sized to the Operation

The report lays out a three-level AI rollout for maintenance operations. Level 1 starts with write-ups the crew already does every shift, so teams don't have to retrain. Level 2 automates multi-step workflows while keeping a person at each decision point. Level 3 uses the records those workflows produce to show where work still gets stuck and what to automate next.

Get the Report

AI In Operations: Teams Are Leading The Way is available now at https://upkeep-product-site.netlify.app/insights/ai-in-operations/?utm_source=press+release&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=2027AIEbook&utm_content=

Methodology

UpKeep fielded an online survey from September 1 to September 14, 2026. The final sample includes 518 maintenance and operations professionals across eight industry groups and eight role groups. Respondents were drawn from UpKeep's customer and prospect lists. Figures for Directors and VPs of Operations (n=51) and app builders (n=46 to 52) are directional. The full methodology and topline results are included in the report appendix.

About UpKeep

UpKeep is an Asset Operations Platform that unifies maintenance, safety, and reliability in one connected system. AI runs through every layer of the platform, powering workflow automation, letting teams tailor the system to their exact operations, and giving everyone from managers to technicians an open-ended assistant that can help with just about anything.

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SOURCE UpKeep