Can AI replace sysadmins?

System, administer thyself.

That’s what’s happening in IT departments as automation takes on more tasks once handled by system administrators. The role has already shifted in recent years with the rise of cloud computing and DevOps. And while experts say many of the tasks that make up sysadmin roles aren’t likely to disappear, the job title could change as the work becomes more big-picture and supervisory.

A survey of system administrators published last year found that majorities of respondents expected tasks like log analysis (80%), vulnerability prioritization (67%), and troubleshooting (55%) to be automated by 2027. But the report also showed that wider adoption of AI has exposed some limitations, including problems with accuracy, reliability, data privacy, and security.

Shifting skills

IT pros we talked with said they see the job morphing from a reactive monitor of systems to a proactive remediator who plays a more supervisory role to agents and other automation tools.

“From the sysadmin perspective, you’re spending a lot of your time just watching dashboards—eyes-on-glass type of stuff,” Philippe Deblois, Dynatrace’s global VP of solutions engineering, told us. “It has moved a little bit away from that as we’ve added automation over the years. But I see now a path with AI and agents…we’re really moving into this age of…autonomous operations. Maybe that’s still a little pie in the sky in terms of [being] fully automated, but definitely more supervised.”

One of the biggest innovations that AI provides, according to Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester, is the ability to “stitch together disparate metrics” in a way that wasn’t possible before. The next step will be connecting that analysis work to AI agents that perform actual actions within an environment, Ellis said.

“You connect that AI model that basically said, ‘Oh, here’s a problem.’ You connect that to a reasoning model that can then propose an action plan to resolve that situation. And then you connect it to a coding model that creates, say, a Terraform script to go and implement that plan. And suddenly, the role of the human in that is as validator,” Ellis said. “What that human is there to do is to define what the environment should be, what the architecture should be, and to validate that the output of that platform is something that’s not going to cause problems.”

Not all systems have high potential for automation, but those that do are seeing two broad changes, according to Pat Casey, co-founder and CTO of ServiceNow. One is that AI agents are able to help with more of the work, and the other is that the systems themselves might have new AI features that the admin needs to manage, Casey told us.

AI agents have been all the rage for over a year now, but there’s still time before the agentic transformation actually begins in earnest. “[It’s] early days, because it’s spotty in terms of which products they’ve made that kind of investment [in],” Casey said. “It’s not like you can do 100% of your tasks through these automated agents—it’s 10%, 20%. Valuable, but it’s not like you’re going to totally delegate your work to some AI agent that’s gonna do everything for you.”

Who’s next?

But like many other fields right now, as AI replaces more of the rote tasks involved in sysadmin work, companies worry about how the next generation of people guiding this work will be able to learn the ropes.

Previously, a sysadmin might focus on one particular type of compute or storage. But because AI models are better at understanding how systems interconnect, it could consolidate those roles from, say, three different admins to a single efficient one with an AI tool, Forrester’s Ellis said.

“AI will shrink certain entry-level operation roles, but it’ll expand the extreme high-skill system leadership roles,” Sandeep Kumbhat, head of global field CTO at Okta, said. “Those will be more in number as compared to sysadmin.”

With that expansion of senior level roles, companies will need to be proactive about training new recruits to understand bigger-picture structures and offering younger employees effective mentoring, according to Ellis.

“You want to get those people engaged in operations as soon as possible. You should also expose them more holistically across the environment,” he said. “Don’t force people into silos. Because if they’re forced into silos, the information they create is going to be commodified by the AI very quickly.”

Working title

Nobody we talked to for this article thought that companies will necessarily still be hiring for a job called “system administrator” a few years from now. Possible new titles they predicted ranged from simple tweaks like “system owner” or “system governor” to a merging with the role of reliability engineer or platform engineer, and entirely new titles like “AI supervisor” or “AI operator.”

But that doesn’t mean that this type of work is going to vanish soon. “The job is changing, but I have just seen zero evidence that it is going away,” Casey said. “If anything, it’s an exciting time to be in that sort of role, because…you’re getting a chance to do a lot of new stuff, to do the same thing you did before in a different way—hopefully a more efficient, more fun way.”