Yet by 2030, a quarter of the IT ops work you do now will be handled by an unsupervised clanker
A quarter of the work performed by IT infrastructure and operations people will be handled by AI in the year 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, despite AI also complicating your environment and possibly creating outages.Those predictions landed on July 10 in Gartner’s 2026 Hype Cycle for AI in IT Operations, the firm’s view on the future of AI-powered infrastructure management tools.Gartner thinks there’ll be pain before AI-powered automation pays off.
“Many AI-for-IT-operations narratives promise tool consolidation. Agents will query multiple systems, reason across silos and reduce dependence on specialized tools,” the document states, before predicting “the opposite outcome in the near term.”
For at least a couple of years, you’ll have to wrestle with “more layers, more control points, and more specialized observability, orchestration and management capabilities.”The pain will lessen once “future market and vendor consolidation reduce the overall tooling footprint.”Between now and whenever that happens, Gartner suggests ops teams’ strategic planning assumptions include the increased likelihood of AI having a role in an outage.“By 2028, 40 percent of I&O organizations that use agentic I&O at scale in production will experience a business-critical service disruption, up from less than 1 percent of organizations in 2026,” the document states.You, or your bosses, will apparently be undeterred by that trend. Gartner thinks that by 2029, 60 percent of enterprises will deploy agentic AI as a part of IT infrastructure operations – up from fewer than ten percent today. In the same year, just 20 percent of actions suggested by AI will happen after human-in-the-loop approval, down from 80 percent in 2025. That shift will happen due to increased use of “deterministic guardrails” – policy-driven rules that determine what an AI is allowed to do.
