AI Automation Anxiety – Back to Fundamentals
While there is a great deal of hype around AI's ability to completely change enterprise IT, from an automation perspective it is just another technology to be integrated and orchestrated.
While there are many business and technology forces that will shape automation in 2026, AI is likely to be at the top of the list for many enterprise automation leaders. While there is a great deal of hype around AI's ability to completely change enterprise IT, from an automation perspective it is just another technology wave to be integrated and orchestrated. The lessons learned from the automating cloud, SaaS, data pipelines and other new technologies apply to AI as well, success comes starting with a small pilot and iterating, building out monitoring concurrently to evaluate results, and partnering with stakeholders to make sure that their goals are being met.
Show Notes
Summary
The current hype about AI has left many enterprise automation leaders feeling anxious about how they will integrate these rapidly evolving AI solutions while maintaining reliability and resilience. Hosts Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke recommend taking a pause to recognize that there are more similarities than differences with past waves of integrations of new technologies into automation platforms. These integrations succeeded by following proven change management practices: start with small pilots, iterate based on learnings, collaboration with stakeholders, and maintaining production discipline.
Key Points
- AI agents are just another process type to be managed
- Core automation principles remain unchanged, ensuring that the right actions happen at the right time applies equally to AI workloads
- Technology adoption fails more frequently from coordination failures than from technical issues
- Choose pilots based on readiness and suitability for an iterative, learning approach.
- Assess your observability capabilities, AI can introduce non-deterministic execution and outcomes, requiring a higher level of monitoring than traditional applications
Takeaways for Automation Leaders
- Invest in expanding your observability capabilities now, even there's no immediate need for AI integration.
- Improve your team's cross-functional collaboration skills, focusing on business, technical and operations teams.
- Be prepared, tart looking for your AI "learning candidate" automation use cases and platform touch points.
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