IT Ops in 2025 was defined by AI

IT operations in 2025 was—no surprise—defined by AI integration into organizational processes.

Throughout the year, said Human CEO Stu Solomon, IT teams saw an expansion of automation and AI that lowered the bar for getting closer to the big “orchestration” milestone: agents and people working together at a high level.

“That’s the core of this, and that’s not necessarily new,” Solomon said. “We’ve been going down the automation orchestration route for years, but what is new is that it’s happening faster.”

Moving AI forward. We saw a lot of that over the past year. IT Brew has reported on how the increase in AI utilization and integration into systems changed the economics of the AI sector, resulting in huge deals for Nvidia, AMD, and others.

An explosion in tooling capabilities has been helpful on the IT ops side, Agustín Huerta, SVP of digital innovation at Globant, told IT Brew, and the trend accelerated in 2025. But he cautioned that the hyper-specificity of the tools can itself become a problem, leading to bottlenecks for IT teams who lack a more comprehensive view into processes.

“That’s something that IT operations is still trying to figure out how to do—the proper game in terms of upskilling themselves, engaging in a different way with the organization, and at the same time finding the right tools to accelerate,” Huerta said.

Human element. There’s still a role for a human in the loop, but IT pros think that could change soon, leaving AI agents to operate by themselves. Graeme Thompson, Informatica CIO, said that while the continued role of AI on the operations side has been a huge factor for organizations, third-party risk is becoming a major issue for IT teams. When hyperscaled companies like Amazon or CrowdStrike run into trouble, the ramifications can impact the rest of the world.

“I don’t think, from an operations perspective, our business continuity and third-party risk practices have kept up with the increased risk that we all carry, because we’re all dependent on these hyperscales,” Thompson said.

Cash business. The introduction of agentic AI could impact budgets. Thompson told IT Brew that costs can become prohibitive when organizations adopt new technologies—but that shouldn’t dissuade teams from pushing for investment. It’s a matter of balancing the tight budgetary requirements with the potential for efficiency.

“There’s obviously efficiency gains to be had on things like end user services, case management, helping our end users get productive use out of the technology that we provide to them,” Thompson said. “And then there’ll be all the new capabilities we can deploy.”

Locked in. Efficiency is key, but only when the technology is properly applied. In 2025, how to balance the two was an open question. Controlling how tooling is deployed for operations is part of the process. Huerta told IT Brew that organizations that ensure the transformation to AI-enabled IT teams goes smoothly tend to get better results; compliance and connection are key.

“At some point, they will put some mechanisms to control what gets into production or how certain things could be shared across the organization to make sure that no one is like building something that could lead to misinformation or disinformation,” Huerta said. “But they don’t want to be the bottleneck for the whole transformation.”