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Gartner: 30% of Enterprises Will Automate More Than Half of Network Activities by 2026

Automation Is Key to I&O Delivering Greater Value, Efficiency and Agility

By 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from under 10% in mid-2023, according to Gartner, Inc.

"Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are increasingly looking to AI-based analytics and augmented decision making, including intelligent automation (IA), to improve operational resilience and responsiveness, address complexity and process increasingly large amounts of data through automation," said Chris Saunderson, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.

IA for I&O is the application of AI techniques, including generative AI (GenAI) to automate decision making and execute actions for I&O initiatives. It is increasingly being used to empower business agility and is driving more advanced I&O service enablement.

IA is an emerging technology that is in the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2024 and is expected to reach mainstream adoption in the next five to ten years.

The addition of GenAI capabilities has increased demand in the market for IA platforms. Through the use of analysis and automation, IA enables capabilities that deliver improved operations, efficiency and insight generation.

"Technology providers that offer best-of-breed tools for AI for IT operations (AIOps), application performance monitoring and GenAI will influence IA," said Saunderson. "AIOps and stand-alone automation technology providers may expand their offerings to IA, through acquisitions or organic development."

Hyperautomation Continues to Be Staple Discipline for 90% of Large Enterprises

"Along with IA, hyperautomation has seen a resurgence in interest and demand since the fervor of GenAI that launched in November 2022," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "Hyperautomation involves the use of multiple technologies and tools including AI, machine learning, event-driven software architecture and robotic process automation, among others."

Less than 20% of organizations have mastered the measurement of hyperautomation initiatives. "Hyperautomation initiatives are often an integral part of a larger technology roadmap that includes systems of record on one end of the spectrum, and AI and GenAI on the other," said Karamouzis.

The demand for hyperautomation is driven by the mandate for operational excellence across processes and functions to support resilience. This demand only continues to increase the growth of offerings provided by hyperautomation.

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AI can be a critical part of the IT puzzle by helping to accelerate incident response, reduce downtime and keep customers happy. These gains can shift executive attitudes, as leaders come to see AI agents not just as experimental tools, but as reliable partners in mission-critical situations. It's no surprise, then, that 81% of IT and business executives now trust AI agents to take action during a crisis ...

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While AI adoption is accelerating, concerns about reliability and trust make it challenging to transition initiatives from concept to production, according to the 2025 State of Observability Report from Dynatrace ...

New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast ... found that with a median annual cost of high-impact IT outages reaching $76 million, organizations are investing in AI-strengthened observability to detect and resolve issues faster. Here are 5 key takeaways from this year's report ...

Artificial intelligence is transforming network operations (NetOps), supercharging automation, enabling new predictive capabilities, improving visibility and powering nearly continuous optimization ... When trained on live network data and large libraries of validated automations, GenAI and agentic AI can help NetOps teams be more productive while making networks more reliable, easier to manage and secure. And as agentic AI becomes more powerful, AI's overall usefulness to the NetOps team will increase exponentially ...

For years, the tech industry has treated cloud infrastructure as a destination. Shift the infrastructure to the cloud, win the game. The rise of AWS, GCP, and Azure cemented that belief — shift the infrastructure and let hyperscalers handle the rest. But, in the last year or two, this infrastructure-centered view has started to change. The explosion of AI workloads, the mainstreaming of edge computing, and a wave of developer tooling startups have exposed a new truth: infrastructure is no longer the battlefield. It's the starting point. The differentiator isn't who owns the cloud, it's who makes it usable, fast, and built for modern workloads ...

Organizations across the globe face unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as their digital footprints expand across cloud, on-premises, and remote environments. Ransomware continues to surge as one of the top global cyber threats, with attacks increasing(link is external) by 33% globally in 2024 and organizations experiencing an average of 1,200 weekly attacks — the highest in three years ...

Every organization is scrambling to adopt AI, but many are missing out on one of its most transformative benefits: the ability to increase creativity within and across teams ... To carve a better path forward, organizations should approach AI rollouts in a strategic way that keeps people at the center of work. Here, I share three ways to build better rollouts that can help organizations harness AI as a creativity multiplier ...

With data, we can drive digital transformation by turning insights into action. At the heart of any meaningful digital transformation strategy lies a critical component that often gets overlooked: Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) ...

Gartner: 30% of Enterprises Will Automate More Than Half of Network Activities by 2026

Automation Is Key to I&O Delivering Greater Value, Efficiency and Agility

By 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from under 10% in mid-2023, according to Gartner, Inc.

"Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are increasingly looking to AI-based analytics and augmented decision making, including intelligent automation (IA), to improve operational resilience and responsiveness, address complexity and process increasingly large amounts of data through automation," said Chris Saunderson, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.

IA for I&O is the application of AI techniques, including generative AI (GenAI) to automate decision making and execute actions for I&O initiatives. It is increasingly being used to empower business agility and is driving more advanced I&O service enablement.

IA is an emerging technology that is in the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2024 and is expected to reach mainstream adoption in the next five to ten years.

The addition of GenAI capabilities has increased demand in the market for IA platforms. Through the use of analysis and automation, IA enables capabilities that deliver improved operations, efficiency and insight generation.

"Technology providers that offer best-of-breed tools for AI for IT operations (AIOps), application performance monitoring and GenAI will influence IA," said Saunderson. "AIOps and stand-alone automation technology providers may expand their offerings to IA, through acquisitions or organic development."

Hyperautomation Continues to Be Staple Discipline for 90% of Large Enterprises

"Along with IA, hyperautomation has seen a resurgence in interest and demand since the fervor of GenAI that launched in November 2022," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "Hyperautomation involves the use of multiple technologies and tools including AI, machine learning, event-driven software architecture and robotic process automation, among others."

Less than 20% of organizations have mastered the measurement of hyperautomation initiatives. "Hyperautomation initiatives are often an integral part of a larger technology roadmap that includes systems of record on one end of the spectrum, and AI and GenAI on the other," said Karamouzis.

The demand for hyperautomation is driven by the mandate for operational excellence across processes and functions to support resilience. This demand only continues to increase the growth of offerings provided by hyperautomation.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has long been the cornerstone of system reliability ... However, the landscape has evolved ... The question is no longer whether APM is important. The question is: What does observability need to become to support this new era? ...

AI can be a critical part of the IT puzzle by helping to accelerate incident response, reduce downtime and keep customers happy. These gains can shift executive attitudes, as leaders come to see AI agents not just as experimental tools, but as reliable partners in mission-critical situations. It's no surprise, then, that 81% of IT and business executives now trust AI agents to take action during a crisis ...

Every week, a new AI tool claims to reinvent the enterprise. But beneath the hype, many enterprises are grappling with a sobering reality: the GenAI solutions they've deployed are falling far short of expectations ...

While AI adoption is accelerating, concerns about reliability and trust make it challenging to transition initiatives from concept to production, according to the 2025 State of Observability Report from Dynatrace ...

New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast ... found that with a median annual cost of high-impact IT outages reaching $76 million, organizations are investing in AI-strengthened observability to detect and resolve issues faster. Here are 5 key takeaways from this year's report ...

Artificial intelligence is transforming network operations (NetOps), supercharging automation, enabling new predictive capabilities, improving visibility and powering nearly continuous optimization ... When trained on live network data and large libraries of validated automations, GenAI and agentic AI can help NetOps teams be more productive while making networks more reliable, easier to manage and secure. And as agentic AI becomes more powerful, AI's overall usefulness to the NetOps team will increase exponentially ...

For years, the tech industry has treated cloud infrastructure as a destination. Shift the infrastructure to the cloud, win the game. The rise of AWS, GCP, and Azure cemented that belief — shift the infrastructure and let hyperscalers handle the rest. But, in the last year or two, this infrastructure-centered view has started to change. The explosion of AI workloads, the mainstreaming of edge computing, and a wave of developer tooling startups have exposed a new truth: infrastructure is no longer the battlefield. It's the starting point. The differentiator isn't who owns the cloud, it's who makes it usable, fast, and built for modern workloads ...

Organizations across the globe face unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as their digital footprints expand across cloud, on-premises, and remote environments. Ransomware continues to surge as one of the top global cyber threats, with attacks increasing(link is external) by 33% globally in 2024 and organizations experiencing an average of 1,200 weekly attacks — the highest in three years ...

Every organization is scrambling to adopt AI, but many are missing out on one of its most transformative benefits: the ability to increase creativity within and across teams ... To carve a better path forward, organizations should approach AI rollouts in a strategic way that keeps people at the center of work. Here, I share three ways to build better rollouts that can help organizations harness AI as a creativity multiplier ...

With data, we can drive digital transformation by turning insights into action. At the heart of any meaningful digital transformation strategy lies a critical component that often gets overlooked: Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) ...