Half of all organisations will use AI agents with minimal human involvement in IT operations by 2030, up from almost none this year, Gartner predicts. The forecast is one of five trends in Gartner's Top AI Trends in Infrastructure and IT Operations for 2027.
Gartner surveyed 272 heads of infrastructure and operations (I&O) in April and May 2026. It found 58 per cent see scaling AI proofs of concept into I&O adoption as an important priority over the next 12 months.
"Rather than trying to address every aspect of AI simultaneously, heads of I&O should focus on a small number of strategic investments that deliver meaningful impact," said Jonathan Forest, VP Analyst at Gartner.
Gartner says organisations are deploying agents to automate incident triage, change validation and remediation.
"AI agents are driving a shift from reactive, human-in-the-loop operations to proactive, human-on-the-loop operations," Forest said.
The second trend is cost. Agentic systems perform multistep tasks that consume far more tokens than conversational AI, creating new cost management problems.
Through 2027, Gartner predicts enterprises running IT operations agents on uncapped, token-based pricing will exceed their initial cost expectations by more than 50 per cent. It compares them with organisations on predictable subscription or bundled pricing.
Gartner recommends a strict "no telemetry, no deployment" policy to remove blind spots in AI spending and token use.
The third trend is hybrid infrastructure. Most enterprises consume existing foundation models through inference rather than training their own. Their data sits across public clouds, private data centres and the edge.
Privacy, cost, performance and data sovereignty requirements are accelerating that shift. By 2029, Gartner predicts 80 per cent of large enterprises will run production AI workloads across at least three infrastructure environments.
Fourth, Gartner says AI is converging operational and cyber security risk. Shared AI tooling, telemetry and agents are pushing I&O and security teams closer together.
By 2030, Gartner expects 25 per cent of enterprises to merge their network and security operations centres, up from 5 per cent in 2026. Those mergers are predicted to cut total tooling and staff spend by more than 25 per cent.
The fifth trend casts I&O as the orchestrator of the enterprise AI platform, coordinating infrastructure, governance, security and operations across cloud, data centre and edge.
Through 2030, Gartner predicts organisations without a strong I&O function driving AI infrastructure design will be twice as likely to fail with AI.
"The high cost of AI infrastructure leaves little room for error, placing I&O at the center of enterprise AI success," Forest said. He said I&O heads must lift their teams' capabilities, reduce technical debt and move from reactive operations to enabling enterprise AI.