Analyst Report

Gartner® Top AI Trends in Infrastructure & IT Operations for 2027

Build Your 2027 Plan for Agentic Infrastructure Operations

Put AI agents to work in operations. Prepare your infrastructure team to support AI across the business. Understand the priorities, controls, and operating capabilities that connect those two responsibilities.

Gartner identifies five AI trends shaping infrastructure and operations in 2027. Explore where to introduce agents, how to manage their cost and risk, and what I&O needs to coordinate as enterprise AI expands.

Agents Are Moving Into Production

Put Agents to Work in Infrastructure & IT Operations

AI changes both the work infrastructure teams perform and the services the business expects them to provide. Your 2027 plan needs to address both.

Agents are taking on investigation, change validation, and remediation tasks. The planning decision is where to begin, what authority to grant, and how to establish that the required work happened. Gartner recommends starting with lower-risk activities and retaining human oversight for higher-risk execution.

By 2030, Gartner predicts that 50% of organizations will use AI agents with minimal human involvement in IT operations, up from nearly 0% in 2026.

Gartner, Top AI Trends in Infrastructure and IT Operations for 2027, 14 September 2026

Why It Matters

Prepare I&O to Orchestrate Enterprise AI

As AI expands across the business, I&O takes on greater responsibility for the infrastructure and operational services underneath it. That means coordinating with platform, software, data, and security teams around integration, governance, reliability, and cost.

Turn the Trends Into Your 2027 Priorities

Use the research to work through five decisions that will shape how your team adopts and supports AI.

Choose Where Agents Should Begin

Identify operational tasks where reasoning can improve the outcome. Establish the context, tools, approval boundaries, and evidence each use case needs before expanding its authority.

Define How I&O Will Enable Enterprise AI

Clarify the services your team will provide and the responsibilities it will share with other teams. Plan how infrastructure capabilities become accessible, governed, and reusable across AI initiatives.

Connect Security Findings to Operational Response

Coordinate security and infrastructure teams around high-risk vulnerabilities, patching, and agent access. Determine how a finding moves from assessment into an authorized change with a verified result.

Prepare for AI Across Multiple Environments

Consider how cloud, data center, and edge deployments affect infrastructure delivery and ongoing operations. Account for the privacy, performance, cost, and data-location requirements influencing inference deployment.

Make Reasoning Earn Its Cost

Evaluate agent use against successful outcomes. Determine where reasoning adds value, where established automation should carry the work, and how to track consumption as operational use grows.

Explore Gartner’s recommendations for all five priorities and the implications for your infrastructure and operations strategy.

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Why Itential

Itential is The Platform for Agentic Infrastructure Operations

Itential connects AI reasoning to the automation, tools, and infrastructure systems your teams already use. Put agents to work through governed deterministic execution, coordinate operations across teams and systems, and retain established controls as AI adoption grows.

Connect Security Findings to Infrastructure Response
Use FlowAgents to interpret vulnerability advisories against infrastructure context and identify affected devices. Coordinate remediation workflows, approvals, validation, and evidence across security and infrastructure operations.
Put AI Agents to Work on Production Infrastructure
Build FlowAgents that reason through operational goals using live context and scoped tools. Connect external AI through the Itential Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server. Execute through established workflows with the approvals, validation, and recovery paths each operation requires.
Give I&O the Foundation to Orchestrate Across Teams & Systems
Connect monitoring, inventory, ITSM, security, and infrastructure automation into coordinated processes. Make existing capabilities available as reusable workflows, APIs, and self-service operations that authorized teams and agents can consume.
Govern Agent & Human Actions
Apply access controls, scoped capabilities, and approval requirements to operational work. Retain attributable execution records so teams can inspect what ran and assess the result.
Coordinate Across Infrastructure Domains
Orchestrate changes across cloud, network, security, and ITSM systems. Carry dependencies, validation, and execution requirements through the process as work crosses team and technology boundaries.
Enable Governed AI on Deterministic Workflows
Use agents where interpretation and judgment add value. Use deterministic workflows for established procedures, keeping execution controls in place as teams choose the approach each task needs.

Explore the Itential Platform

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, and Itential’s FlowAI answered that. Our teams were building production-ready agents in minutes, within the same governance and access controls we already rely on.

Greg Freeman

Vice President, Network and Customer Transformation, Lumen

Get Started

Get the Research for Your 2027 Plan

Read Gartner’s Top AI Trends in Infrastructure and IT Operations for 2027 to understand the priorities shaping operational AI adoption and enterprise AI delivery.

Get the Complimentary Report

Gartner, Top AI Trends in Infrastructure and IT Operations for 2027, Jonathan Forest, Chandra Mukhyala, Nauman Raja, Ashish Banerjee, Sushovan Mukhopadhyay, 14 September 2026, G00846101.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Business and Technology Insights Organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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