By Tom O'Rourke in I&O Leadership —

Takeaways from Gartner IO&CS 2025 (Las Vegas)

IO&CS reflected a realistic and pragmatic perspective of how AI is rapidly changing enterprise I&O, while acknowledging that autonomous AI's contribution to improved operations is years away, and that the cost of AI tools is likely to rise to pay for the huge costs of building AI data centers.

Takeaways from Gartner IO&CS 2025 (Las Vegas)

The North American Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IO&CS) conference takes place in December each year, providing an opportunity to take a look back at what has changed and what has stayed the same over the past twelve months for enterprise infrastructure and operations leaders.

I attend Gartner IO&CS in Las Vegas each year for an immersive three day dive into a broad and deep set of technical, business and leadership topics relevant to my I&O consulting, blogging and podcasting focus. In today’s world, information on many of the topics is often available online, attending in person provides a chance to talk directly with the presenter and other members of the audience, diving deeper into the meaty areas of the topic.

A Pragmatic View of AI

As discussed in the EAE episode, AI continued to be a major theme at this year’s event, with most discussions grounded in learnings from actual enterprise experiences. The initial rush to implement AI has been tempered by projects failing to meet expectations and ROI challenges. Promises of autonomous operation continue, however, the unpredictability of responses and the difficulty of stopping an agentic process in real-time make it difficult to satisfy production requirements for reliability with a minimum of risk.

AI is Automation

As AI matures, its management and operation will shift from development teams into I&O, fitting alongside the other automation solutions for managing business processes, resource configuration, and process orchestration. I&O will become responsible for AI service delivery reliability and resilience, as well as managing service costs.

I&O as a Platform

I&O needs to continue it’s evolution from being asset- and service-centric to a platform-centric approach that treats the infrastructure portfolio as a family of products which are measured for customer value and business impact while still delivering operational efficiency and reliability.

An I&O as a platform strategy integrates:

  • product management practices to manage customer requirements and the evolution of I&O capabilities offered over time,
  • a rethinking of organization roles and structure to better engage with the teams building new business capabilities, and
  • an operating model that leverages agility and automation to improve service quality and service velocity

Shifting to I&O as a platform is a significant change. The increased focus on business outcome as well as improvements in customer and stakeholder satisfaction make it worth evaluating. We’ll explore I&O as a platform in future posts.

EAE 28 Show Notes

Enterprise IT continues to evolve rapidly as organizations look for effective ways to use AI and other automation tools to streamline their processes. In this Enterprise Automation Excellence episode, Dan Twing and I discuss my learnings from December's Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference. Our topics include the emerging pragmatism around AI, continuous operations, managing the automation portfolio as a platform, and the importance of communicating automation value in business terms. The episode reinforces the need for automation leaders to focus on business outcomes and maintain reliability as the technology landscape changes.

Key Points

  • Top-down pressure to adopt AI is solution-driven rather than problem-focused
  • Real autonomy in agentic AI remains elusive, with many solutions underperforming or costing much more than projected
  • Platform-centric I&O represents the next maturity stage for infrastructure management, automation leaders should adopt this approach as they evaluate which tools belong in their portfolio
  • While AI tools continue to improve rapidly, I&O leaders should anticipate that costs will rise to reflect the large amounts of money being invested.

Takeaways for Automation Leaders

  • AI is automation, as the hype dissipates the operation of these tools will wind up in the automation center of excellence
  • Addressing tech debt must be framed in business enablement, enabling faster delivery of new capabilities, while improving reliability and resilience.
  • AI will transform expectations around automation, increasing demand and requiring more agility to satisfy business needs.

EAE Episode 8 - Five Key Trends from Gartner I&O 2024

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference
9 - 11 December 2025 | Las Vegas, NV
IO&CS 2025 Day 1 Official Highlights
IO&CS 2025 Day 2 Official Highlights
IO&CS 2025 Day 3 Official Highlights

EAE Podcast Home: https://em360tech.com/podcast-series/enterprise-automation-excellence
Feedback & Questions: mailto:eaepodcast@emausa.com