AgenticOps becomes a priority in IT infrastructure purchases
Omdia research shows that many orgs are modernizing their IT infrastructure to speed AI adoption or making built-in AI capabilities a must-have for new infrastructure investments.
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Published: 02 Oct 2026
Artificial intelligence for IT operations has arrived, and the early returns appear game-changing for IT admins. For decades now, IT administrators have been forced to manage increasingly distributed and complex environments while being required to take on more and greater responsibilities. As businesses race to embrace AI initiatives, another new layer of complexity falls on IT teams: They must optimize, secure and properly govern these rapidly evolving workloads.
Seeking a way to keep pace with demands, many IT teams have already embraced generative and agentic AI tools to better automate, optimize and troubleshoot their IT environments. According to research from Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget, 90% of practitioners agreed that "the increased use of AI for IT operations allows (or will allow) me to do more strategic work for my organization."
Traditional automation and observability tools, while powerful, have limitations. They are often more reactive and require significant manual interaction and coordination. Part of the promise of agentic IT ops is that the AI can develop a contextual understanding of your specific AI environment and therefore become more empowered to proactively respond to demands or mitigate issues.
Strong excitement persists among early missteps
Among adopters of AI for use in IT operations, a majority of practitioners (52%) agreed that the use of AI for IT operational tasks led to some initial bad experiences that have made them more cautious. Those early missteps seem not to have dampened the enthusiasm for the potential of AI in assisting IT admins, but it introduces new considerations and questions:
How should teams balance AI or agentic tools vs. traditional automation? Agentic models are powerful but can consume large amounts of tokens. Existing automation is already in place and, therefore, might be more cost-effective.
How can organizations balance ease of operations while controlling rising token costs that come with increased agentic adoption?
When is it better to use off-the-shelf tools, and when should teams develop their own custom projects?
Accessing agentic IT operational capabilities does not require building custom projects. Multiple IT operations vendors, such as ServiceNow and Red Hat, are providing tools to better integrate the use of AI into existing IT processes.
Agentic AI becomes a differentiator for new IT infrastructure purchases
The major IT infrastructure providers are also integrating both generative and agentic AI into their platforms to simplify management, maintenance, root cause identification and remediation.
For IT decision-makers, AI-powered operational capabilities and controls have become 'must-have' buying criteria in infrastructure purchases -- now and moving forward.
For example, HPE GreenLake Intelligence provides agentic tools spanning servers, networking and storage, utilizing multiple AI agents, each with domain expertise tied to specific infrastructure capabilities and designed to interoperate. Agents can pull from telemetry, logs and configuration data to provide context into the specific environment. Communication among agents is based on Model Context Protocol (MCP) open source standard connections, providing the option to collaborate with third parties, such as ServiceNow. GreenLake also provides a copilot interface for admins to have human-in-the-loop controls and governance, interacting with agents using natural language and defining the level of autonomy provided to the agents.
Beyond HPE, multiple other infrastructure vendors -- including Cisco, Dell Technologies, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Lenovo and NetApp -- have begun offering AI-powered capabilities to assist with multiple IT operations, such as provisioning and troubleshooting.
For IT decision-makers, AI-powered operational capabilities and controls have become "must-have" buying criteria in infrastructure purchases -- now and moving forward. According to the Omdia research mentioned previously, 80% of organizations said they are actively modernizing their infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of integrated AI capabilities (44%) or considering integrated AI capabilities as a requirement for any new infrastructure investment (36%).
Having the right controls, governance and accountability in place will be critical in driving increased usage of agentic-based IT operations within enterprise environments. Early returns, however, are already incredibly positive, as 90% of practitioners agreed that the integration and use of AI in IT infrastructure management will have a positive impact on IT professionals' careers.
Scott Sinclair is Practice Director with Omdia covering the storage industry.
Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
