Automation in IT promises to eliminate manual, repetitive work to improve both accuracy and speed. Yet some IT teams resist automation solutions out of fear of being replaced, a lack of familiarity with the tools, or uncertainty about how automation will benefit them in their jobs.
As it turns out, “automating IT is as much a cultural shift as it is a technical one,” says Tom Allen (LinkedIn: Tom Allen), founder of The AI Journal.
What exactly needs to change culturally for success with IT automation? And how can leaders eliminate the “fear factor” and encourage IT workers to begin looking for opportunities to automate repetitive tasks? To find out, we posed this question to the Foundry Influencers Network: What cultural changes are needed on the path to automating IT, and what advice would you offer for how to get started? These five steps, which experts note can happen simultaneously, will put IT teams on the path to success.
Step 1: Build a culture of safety
Introducing new automations can create a sense of vulnerability among employees, who may be worried that the coming changes will wipe out their positions.
“In B2B settings, leaders should aim to build psychological resilience and safety for their teams so that they feel empowered to upskill persistently and steadily, to experiment confidently, and to overcome mindset barriers such as the fear of losing control,” says Elitsa Krumova (LinkedIn: Elitsa Krumova), global thought leader and B2B tech influencer in emerging and future technologies. “In B2B environments, the real obstacles do not stem from technology but from these psychological barriers.”
Step 2: Change success measurements
A culture shift must also be accompanied by a change in employee incentives, says Peter Nichol (LinkedIn: Peter Nichol), data and analytics leader for North America at Nestlé Health Science. He notes that IT teams have historically been evaluated on how active they are. But if automation efforts are successful, teams will actually end up closing fewer service tickets while still being more effective overall.
“Start by redefining what you reward,” Nichol says. “If closing 200 tickets is the badge of honor, you are rewarding activity. Eliminating the need for those tickets is the real outcome. High-performing IT organizations measure cost and effort avoided, not effort expended.”
Nichol notes that organizations have often equated excellence with visible effort, including not only the number of incidents resolved, but also the number of weekends sacrificed by employees. “Running toward the fire defined the hero,” he says. “When an AI agent resolves those 200 tickets overnight, that model collapses. The shift is clear: outcomes over activity, quantified impact over visible effort.”
Step 3: Encourage a shift in perspective
Gene De Libero (LinkedIn: Gene De Libero), principal consultant at Digital Mindshare LLC, says leaders must embrace a mindset that stops treating manual effort as a virtue to be rewarded. “Trade fear of replacement for a culture of high-value engineering,” he says. “Automation doesn’t fire people. It fires tedious work. Stop treating manual effort as proof of value. Treat it as debt.”
“It all starts with being conscious,” says Peter van Barneveld (LinkedIn: Peter van Barneveld), group innovation manager at Dustin. “You need to develop a habit of monitoring what’s happening while you work, identifying repetitive tasks, and asking yourself if they can be automated.”
Robert Siciliano (LinkedIn: Robert Siciliano), CEO at Protect Now LLC, says that the transition to automation requires a shift in organizational mindset from one of “protective gatekeeping” to “service-oriented empowerment.”
Siciliano echoes his peers in suggesting that organizations eliminate repetitive “toil” through low-risk wins that demonstrate immediate value and encourage adoption. He adds that new tools and processes should be designed around a goal of a “tired-person” level of usability (meaning that employees don’t need to expend any extra mental energy to figure out a complex system).
Over time, Siciliano says, employees will see the value of eliminating manual processes. “Ultimately, framing automation as preventative medicine treats manual inefficiencies as the systemic risks they are,” he says, “leading to securing the long-term digital health of the enterprise.”
Step 4: Align teams on the new model
IT leaders must recognize that introducing new automation to IT teams is about far more than training employees on new IT service management (ITSM) features, says e-commerce product manager Arun Krishnakumar (LinkedIn: Arun Krishnakumar).
“The biggest cultural change is to stop treating automation as just a technology project and start treating it as an operating model shift,” Krishnakumar says. “Teams need to be aligned on the problem they are solving and operate from the point of view of a shared set of outcomes. My advice would be to start with one high-volume, repetitive use case, build a small minimum viable product, measure the impact, and then scale only after the solution proves useful, secure, and reliable.”
Step 5: Start small
Allen says that teams must move away from a “firefighting” mindset — embracing the idea of not only doing work faster but eliminating it entirely where possible. “To get started, create a small, cross‑functional squad (IT ops, security, business owners) and give them permission to automate a painful, well‑understood workflow end‑to‑end,” he says. “Pair this with transparent metrics on incidents avoided, hours saved, and satisfaction improved, so automation is seen as a shared success rather than a threat to individual roles.”
Vivek Singh (LinkedIn: Vivek Singh), senior vice president of IT and strategic planning at PALNAR, echoes the idea that fast, small wins are key to long-term success. “To begin, choose one difficult and repetitive task, automate it, and measure success,” he says. “Get quick wins first, building trust and motivation before the naysayers can build momentum and slow things down.”
For Krumova, the key lies not only in showing early successes, but in doing so in particularly valuable and visible areas. “My advice would be to start simply and small with a limited number of high-visibility pilots that resolve actual business pain points,” she says. “This will introduce enthusiastic, cross-functional supporters from every department right from the beginning.”
Krumova cautions leaders against focusing on efficiency and productivity gains during the early stages of a culture shift. “Organizations should track success by how engaged employees are and how quickly innovation occurs, rather than by how much time or money is saved,” she says. “Then, leaders should aim to expand and scale what has proven to work, with strong sponsorship from top executives.”
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