Today’s Platform Engineer Needs to Build AI-Ready Infrastructure

The demands on today’s platform engineers are evolving at breakneck speed. What began as a natural evolution from DevOps has transformed into a distinct discipline with expanding responsibilities. Today’s platform engineers find themselves at an inflection point: they must not only manage increasingly complex cloud-native environments but also architect the foundation for Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the enterprise. This mandate requires rethinking infrastructure from the ground up to support the unique demands of AI workloads.

It’s undeniable, however, that this role and shift are both necessary. Gartner states that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery — up from 45% in 2022. By 2027, its adoption is expected to significantly impact how infrastructure and operations teams make technology choices, influencing more than half of their decisions.