Analyst Report

2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration Tools

Infrastructure Automation Is Going Agentic. Are You Ready to Stay in Control?

The 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration Tools makes it clear: automation alone isn’t enough. As AI and AI agents move into infrastructure operations, enterprises need platforms that orchestrate execution, enforce policy, and keep humans in control of agentic and deterministic actions alike.

Download the report to explore how market expectations have evolved, what’s required to operationalize automation and AI across your hybrid infrastructure landscape, and why Itential was named a representative vendor for the third consecutive time.

Key Report Insights

- AI and AI agents are now core to the market. Vendors are embedding agentic interfaces to speed delivery and cut cognitive load.
- Why orchestration is a key enabler of platform engineering and product-based delivery.
- How cost pressure is driving competitive displacement of incumbent tools.
- IA&O platforms are becoming the delivery layer for AI infrastructure, not just traditional infrastructure.
- Gartner recommends platforms with low-code interfaces, AI capabilities, and AI agents to speed adoption and value realization.

Market Shifts

Why Product Thinking & AI Are Reshaping Infrastructure Delivery

Infrastructure teams are expected to deliver consistent, on-demand services, not ad hoc scripts or one-off tickets. That’s why platform engineering keeps rising: treat infrastructure like a product, built once and consumed many times. Now AI is accelerating the shift, with agentic interfaces that speed delivery and remove cognitive load from the teams behind them.

But most automation strategies fall short. Teams are stuck with fragmented tools, disconnected workflows, and domain-specific automations that don’t scale. The result is more complexity, slower delivery, and limited ROI. Adding AI on top of that fragmentation only multiplies the risk without a control layer underneath it.

Automation alone won’t get you there. Orchestration, with control built in, is what makes agentic operations enterprise-ready.

Gartner’s Take

Gartner’s Take: You Can’t Productize or Operationalize AI Without Orchestration

Gartner’s recommendation is clear: orchestration is essential to evolving from isolated automations to platform-driven service delivery, and it’s now the layer that makes AI-driven operations safe.

To support productized infrastructure and agentic operations, organizations need platforms that unify provisioning, configuration, and operations into full-lifecycle workflows, with policy, governance, and human oversight built in. This is how teams deliver infrastructure as standardized, reusable services at the speed and scale modern environments demand, while keeping control of what AI and automation actually execute.

AI Can Reason. It Can’t Be Trusted to Act, Yet.

Large language models are probabilistic. Infrastructure is unforgiving. A model that’s right 95% of the time is a liability when the other 5% touches production networks, firewalls, or cloud environments.

Point AI directly at your infrastructure and you introduce a new kind of risk. Agent sprawl is the next script sprawl: more actors making more changes, faster, and harder to see. The answer isn’t smarter AI. It’s a governed execution layer that sits between reasoning and action, so every AI-initiated change is validated, approved, and auditable before it reaches your infrastructure.

What the 2026 Guide Says Enterprises Need

The Capabilities Gartner Says Enterprises Now Need

The 2026 Gartner Market Guide is specific about the capabilities infrastructure teams now need. Here is each requirement, and how Itential supports.

Gartner Requirements	How Itential Supports
Orchestration across the full lifecycle, not isolated task automation.	Itential runs multi-step workflows that chain provisioning, configuration, change, compliance checks, and remediation across different systems, instead of standalone scripts.
Low-code interfaces, AI capabilities, and AI agents to speed adoption and skills.	Build workflows in a low-code designer, and build agents from natural language with FlowAI. FlowAgents can call workflows as tools, and workflows can call FlowAgents as steps.
Coverage across hybrid infrastructure, now including AI infrastructure.	Itential executes against on-prem, cloud, and edge targets through its integrations and Itential Gateway, including the infrastructure that AI workloads run on.
Infrastructure managed as code, with self-service and API access.	Workflows are exposed through a self-service catalog, a REST API, and the Itential MCP Server. Configuration and drift checks run as steps inside those workflows.
An extensible ecosystem that integrates security, testing, and cost tooling.	1,000+ open source integrations, plus REST and API connectors, let workflows call the security, ITSM, CMDB, and cloud tools you already run.
Policy, governance, and human oversight embedded in delivery, not bolted on.	Every workflow and FlowAgent run enforces RBAC, can require approval gates, and is recorded in an audit trail. The same controls apply whether a human or an agent starts it. Itential does not keep copies of your infrastructure data.

Why Itential

Itential Is Purpose-Built for Infrastructure Orchestration in the Agentic Era

The 2026 Gartner Market Guide calls for platforms that go beyond task automation, enabling full-service orchestration, cross-domain workflows, AI-ready operations, and infrastructure-as-a-product delivery. That’s exactly the approach Itential was built to support.

Itential’s agentic operations platform helps infrastructure and platform teams operationalize automation and AI across hybrid environments, turning fragmented tools into cohesive, reusable, governed services.

From platform engineering teams to infrastructure operations, Itential is the orchestration foundation for delivering infrastructure as a product and running AI-driven operations faster, safer, and at scale.

What Sets Itential Apart

Anyone can generate a recommendation. Itential executes it safely on production infrastructure, whether a person or an agent starts the work.

The same governance for people and AI.
Every action runs through the same RBAC, approval gates, and audit trail, whether a person or a FlowAgent starts it. AI doesn’t get a bypass.
AI that acts, not just advises.
FlowAI and FlowAgents don’t stop at suggestions. They take real action through the paths you already use, automations run via Itential Gateway, direct API calls, and workflows in the platform, all under the same governance.
Orchestration above the tools you already run.
Coordinate network and infrastructure controllers, cloud platforms, physical infrastructure, IT systems like ServiceNow, sources of truth and AIOps and telemetry tools with 1,000+ integrations, across on-prem, cloud, and edge. One orchestration layer over your whole stack, not one more point tool.
The full lifecycle in one place.
Provisioning, configuration, change, compliance, incident response, and decommission run as connected workflows, not disconnected automations.
Purpose-built for infrastructure.
Built for networks, cloud, and infrastructure operations, not a generic automation platform retrofitted for it.

What Our Customers Say

Proven at Enterprise Scale, In The Age of AI

When you’re operating infrastructure at Lumen’s scale, the question was never whether AI could help – it was whether we could trust it in production. Itential FlowAI answered that. Our teams were building production-ready agents in minutes, within the same governance and access controls we already rely on. As we build the next digital backbone for AI, this is the next evolution in our journey with Itential – and it’s redefining how we operate networks at scale.

Greg Freeman

VP Network & Customer Transformation, Lumen

Gartner, Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation and Orchestration Tools, Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts, Hassan Ennaciri, 8 July 2026.

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