For many IT operations teams, the workday is a jumble of frenetic activity, with service agents and engineers scrambling to keep up with a never-ending barrage of alerts, incidents, and requests. This cycle of reactive crisis management and resolution can drain any IT team’s capacity and motivation.
But emerging AI tools can transform departments with their ability to automatically handle many repetitive and time-consuming IT tasks. In this sense, one of the most common complaints among IT teams — that they are stretched thin — can be solved through automation.
“Organizations would benefit not only from significantly reduced downtime and operational costs, but also from giving their skilled professionals the autonomy to focus on higher-value initiatives such as innovation, digital transformation, and sustainable business growth,” says Elitsa Krumova (LinkedIn: Elitsa Krumova), global thought leader and B2B tech influencer in emerging and future technologies. “Ultimately, this shift would deliver resilient and agile IT capabilities that create a genuine competitive edge.”
With agentic AI growing more capable and ubiquitous, many IT leaders want to know where automation can have the greatest impact. To find out, we asked IT professionals and technology industry influencers in the Foundry Influencers Network: If AI could handle one part of an IT ecosystem starting tomorrow, what would make the biggest difference?
Streamlining day-to-day management
Jack Gold (LinkedIn: Jack Gold), president and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, says that seeking answers from the help desk is the “single biggest point of pain” for most end users, noting that many service desks are short-staffed.
“Agentic AI has the potential to offer a major upgrade in service request resolution with its vast knowledge of known — and potentially not-yet-known — user issues, and the ability to interact with corporate systems,” Gold says. “Such capability would also significantly reduce the cost of support, provide for increased resolution without the need to escalate beyond the first-level help desk structure, and free IT resources for potentially more productive tasks.”
Ashutosh Datar (LinkedIn: Ashutosh Datar), senior software engineer at CoreWeave, sees similar potential for AI to automate much of the management of large distributed systems. “Today, engineers spend a huge amount of time reacting to alerts, correlating logs and metrics across systems, figuring out dependency failures and scaling issues, or just dealing with operational drift over time,” he says. “Most of this work is repetitive but still needs deep context.”
Rather than entirely handing infrastructure management over to AI tools, Datar says that engineering teams will shift their focus to the more strategic work of architecting environments. “AI systems that can continuously observe infrastructure behavior, understand relationships between components, and proactively handle routine operational decisions would make a massive difference,” he says. “Not because humans disappear from the loop, but because engineers could spend far more time building and improving systems instead of constantly firefighting them.”
Automating threat detection and triage
Gene De Libero (LinkedIn: Gene De Libero), principal consultant at Digital Mindshare LLC, sees the greatest potential in the automation of security alert triage. “SOC queues run hundreds of alerts deep after tiering, and roughly a third never get investigated, in my experience,” he says. “The real threat hides in what nobody had time to look at. Automate the Tier 1 work and you cut breach risk, mean time to respond, and analyst burnout in one move.”
E-commerce product manager Arun Krishnakumar (LinkedIn: Arun Krishnakumar) also says he would start with incident triage, in addition to technical support. “If AI can help resolve common issues faster, route complex problems to the right teams, and identify recurring patterns, it would make the entire IT ecosystem more responsive,” he says.
Likewise, Kumar Srivastava (LinkedIn: Kumar Srivastava), chief technology officer at Turing Labs, points to detection, triage, and remediation as a natural starting point for AI in IT. “AI would quickly find what broke, identify the root cause, and recommend or trigger fixes before teams waste hours troubleshooting,” Srivastava says. “That would reduce downtime, lower costs, and let IT teams focus on improving systems instead of constantly fighting fires.”
Others also see value in using AI for autonomous threat detection and response. Scott Schober (LinkedIn: Scott Schober), president and CEO at Berkeley Varitronics Systems, Inc., notes that most companies already have “plenty of security tools,” but teams struggle to keep up with a constant stream of alerts.
“Having AI step in to actually connect the dots and shut things down in real time would be a game changer,” Schober says. “I’ve seen how even a few extra minutes can make a breach a lot worse, so speed really matters here. From a business perspective, that kind of capability doesn’t just improve security — it saves money, protects reputation, and lets teams finally get ahead instead of always playing catch-up.”
Unifying systems, data, and insights
While IT systems produce extraordinary volumes of data, much of this information sits idle inside various silos. By bringing systems and data together, organizations can unlock insights that lead to benefits like self-healing and automated remediation.
“If AI could take charge of just one area of the IT ecosystem starting tomorrow, the greatest impact would derive from empowering it to autonomously manage predictive operations, automated remediation workflows, self-healing processes, and anomaly detection across complex hybrid enterprise environments,” says Krumova. “In this scenario, AI would instantly correlate metrics, events, and logs in real time.”
Similarly, Arsalan Khan (arsalankhan.com), a business and digital transformation speaker, advisor, and blogger, says that the greatest value lies in the technology’s ability to bring systems and data together in ways that were previously impractical.
“While AI offers broad benefits, its most significant impact lies in mapping the complex relationship between cross-system data flows and actual business processes,” Khan says. “By uncovering these direct and indirect links, AI can identify obsolete workflows and provide the precise insights needed to drive meaningful operational efficiency, innovation, and KPIs that actually matter.”
Learn more about where to get started with automation in IT.