Human creativity meets agentic intelligence: Your guide to Perform 2026

Key takeaways:

• Perform 2026 will demonstrate how blending human creativity with agentic AI unlocks new levels of business impact to thrive in the agentic AI era.
• Attendees will gain actionable strategies for moving stalled AI pilots to scalable, high‑value AI adoption.
• Perform will reinforce how Dynatrace drives competitive advantage in the age of autonomous intelligence for every practitioner, leader, and partner.

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Perform 2026 will be held January 26–29 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. If you’re unable to join us in person, be sure to register to attend virtually—or view sessions on-demand afterward—so you don’t miss out.

Ahead of the event, we released the Agentic AI Research Report, an inaugural global study focused on how observability and reliability determine the successful operationalization of agentic AI. Its key findings set the stage for Perform 2026:

• From pilot to production: 72% of organizations are now using AI agents for IT operations and DevOps, with rapid growth in customer-facing and non-IT applications.
• Top challenges: Security, data privacy, reliability, and the need for robust observability as a control plane remain critical hurdles.
• Human + AI collaboration: Success depends on intentional human oversight, resilience, and real-time decision-making—underscoring the vital role of observability in scaling agentic AI and autonomous operations.

At Perform 2026, these insights come to life through mainstage keynotes, deep-dive sessions, and real-world success stories, all focused on helping organizations harness AI with confidence and trust.

Be sure to check out the full agenda to find out what you’ll learn. Here are a few highlights:

Succeeding together in the age of AI

Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell will set the stage Wednesday by outlining how enterprises can advance toward autonomous operations and shift from reactive problem‑solving to preventive operations—a model where intelligent systems anticipate issues before they impact the business. He’ll share his vision for how organizations can partner with platforms designed to harness real‑time, contextual data to operate with greater precision, speed, and resilience.

Rick will also highlight the essential role AI‑powered platforms play in elevating operational maturity across modern digital ecosystems. As teams face growing complexity and mounting pressure to deliver reliable, scalable services, he will show how the Dynatrace platform helps unify data, automate decisions, and empower people to focus on higher‑value innovation rather than manual firefighting.

Also on Wednesday, CTO Bernd Greifeneder will detail how real‑time intelligence rooted in contextual data and causal reasoning enables organizations to understand their digital ecosystems with greater clarity and act with precision at scale. Just as importantly, Bernd will spotlight the growing importance of agentic collaboration, showing how AI agents, human expertise, and the broader partner ecosystem accelerate innovation when they operate as a unified system.

Empowering people: The human + AI workforce

On Wednesday afternoon, Chief Transformation Officer Colleen Kozak and Chief AI Officer Sol Rashidi will explore how organizations can build a workforce where humans and AI strengthen each other. Their sessions focus on the operating models, governance structures, and data foundations required to make agentic AI reliable at scale.

They’ll also discuss how to prepare teams for this new era and a practical path toward a workforce that thrives in the agentic world.

On Thursday, a fireside chat with gold medalist, innovator, and entrepreneur Shaun White will bring an additional lens to the theme of human achievement, showing how AI collaboration helps people reach new heights, whether in sports or in business.

Customer success stories: Transforming operations with AI

Across industries, customers are already proving what’s possible when intelligent systems and human expertise work together. This year’s lineup will share the lessons they’ve learned, including:

• United Airlines: Head of IT Operations, Observability, and Engineering Ramiro Zavala will share how they achieve end‑to‑end business observability to keep complex digital experiences running smoothly for millions of passengers.
• Princess Cruises: VP Cloud, Infrastructure, and Cloud Engineering Operations Rick Lapenna will discuss how AI-powered observability helps the company deliver operational excellence and frictionless customer experiences.
• Macquarie Group: Head of Reliability Phillip Grasso-Nguyen will discuss how observability drives reliability and success throughout the company, including their AI workloads.
• TELUS: Principal SRE Dana Harrison and Director, Site Reliability and Engineering Enablement Kulvir Gahunia will talk about Black Friday, their biggest day of the year, and how Dynatrace drives success by acting as the common language between the business level and the practitioners deep in the data.
• Autodesk: Senior Director of Engineering Alex Bicalho will unpack how AI-powered observability empowers greater automation and productivity for a development team of thousands.​
• Vodafone: Head of Engineering and Transformation Luke Bradley will explore how Vodafone moved from their traditional log monitoring solution to an AI-powered observability strategy.​
• Visa CashApp Racing Bulls Formula One Team: Peter Bayer, VCARB CEO, returns after one incredibly eventful Formula One racing season to unpack successes the team is seeing at both the data and AI-powered insight level and on the track.​
• Nationwide Building Society: Head of Service Operations Kate Bristow will explore how observability builds trust and brings business and IT together.

Partner focus: Driving innovation and value together

No company is an island. We’re working with partners from across the industry to build an ecosystem that meets the diverse needs of our customers.

Here are some of the partners you’ll find leading sessions at Perform 2026:

• AWS: Showcasing real‑time developer‑focused observability inside the IDE with Kiro powers, plus autonomous troubleshooting and issue resolution using the AWS DevOps Agent integrated with Dynatrace.
• DXC: Covering how organizations can simplify hybrid‑environment complexity through deep observability adoption, and how integrating Dynatrace with ServiceNow enables predictive, self‑healing, autonomous IT operations.
• Accenture: Providing best‑practice integration patterns for Dynatrace + ServiceNow to advance AIOps maturity, alongside guidance on building business‑journey dashboards that reduce MTTX and connect business and technical insights.
• AHEAD: Demonstrating how Dynatrace and ServiceNow come together to enable closed‑loop, autonomous IT operations, along with practical AIOps strategies for reducing noise, accelerating incident response, and scaling Dynatrace adoption across the enterprise.
• Microsoft: Highlighting 2026 product innovations and deeper Dynatrace–Fabric integration, plus broader updates across the Microsoft ecosystem that strengthen intelligent observability, cloud transformation, and AI‑first operations.

Other partners offering sessions include: SteadyBit, Tricentis, Red Hat, CDW, Crest Data, Nutanix, RHONDOS, ServiceNow, and Google.

Developers @ Perform: Built for people who ship code

Modern teams ship fast. Sometimes really fast. And when you’re pushing code every day, there’s not always time to slow down, experiment, or learn from what just happened. Most of the hard problems developers deal with—understanding how systems actually behave, catching issues early, working across teams—start way before production and change with every commit.

Developers @ Perform is a mix of familiar conference formats and more interactive, hands-on experiences. You’ll find structured talks when it makes sense, quick lightning talks when a story is best told in five minutes, and plenty of time to get your hands on a keyboard and build. You can pick up ideas in a lightning talk, then turn around and try them yourself in your IDE:

• The Developer Lab, a self-service environment where you can explore MCP, agentic AI, vibe coding, and cloud-native observability at your own pace.
• Vibe Coding activities powered by GitHub Copilot, a hackathon-style experience with guided sessions designed to encourage experimentation and creative problem-solving.
• Community recognition and open source discussions around OpenTelemetry, OpenFeature, cloud-native architectures, and AI-assisted development practices.