Ninety percent of companies want to move toward autonomous IT operations over the next two years, with agentic AI, software that plans and carries out multi-step tasks on its own, doing the work. Yet 77 percent say their own organization hesitates to let AI make an operational decision without a human approving it.
Most of those companies mean autonomy with a person at the approval step, and few have the groundwork for even that. Only 41 percent say their IT environment is prepared for autonomous operations, and 19 percent of their IT operations are automated. Businesses are planning around a technology their own environments cannot support.
Humans keep the approval step
A minority want IT that manages itself. Most want AI to propose workflows while people oversee key decisions and actions. Technical specialists, the people who deploy and run these systems, favor supervision more than business and IT leaders do, and fewer of them expect autonomous IT to become the company’s operating model.
They are also warier about the groundwork. Leaders rate their organization’s data more highly than the specialists who work with it every day, which suggests the people making the plans see a tidier picture than the people carrying them out.
Agents can’t see the whole network
Nearly all respondents, 96 percent, say visibility across networks, applications, endpoints and cloud matters for AI-driven IT. Only 17 percent have it unified across all of those. An agent diagnosing an outage needs the whole picture, and in most companies the data sits in pieces or in silos.
Tool sprawl makes it worse. Most respondents say consolidating tools would cut operational friction, yet most also say sprawl has increased their need to integrate systems. Security and compliance concerns top the list of obstacles. Leaders weigh them most heavily, while specialists raise fragmented tools more often than leaders do. Skills gaps and resistance to change also make the list, so the technology is only part of the work.
Oversight of the agents is thin
Fifty-one percent say they lack enough oversight of AI agent performance and reliability. Many also say they do not know enough about how employees use AI or what it costs. Specialists are less confident than leaders that their governance of AI works. A company that cannot see how its agents perform has a concrete reason to keep a person at the approval step.
If you run IT operations, that 51 percent is worth testing against your own shop. Can you say today whether your agents are performing reliably and what they cost?
The service desk is already changing
Almost all respondents expect AI to change what frontline IT and service desk teams can do within two years. Some expect less desk activity overall, some expect the desk to take on more complex issues, and some expect staff to shift from reacting to problems to preventing them. Very few expect the desk to stay largely as it is. A third of companies say their IT team is already extremely effective at using AI to catch and fix problems before employees notice.
Download: The IT leader’s guide to AI code sprawl
