CIOs and CTOs View Agentic AI as Core to Future IT Operations

Significant improvements in operational resilience, more effective use of automation and faster time to market are driving optimism about IT spending in 2025, with a majority of leaders expecting their budgets to increase year-over-year, according to the 2025 State of Digital Operations Report from PagerDuty.

PagerDuty

Source: PagerDuty

Survey results include:

  • 64% of respondents expect IT operations budgets to increase in 2025 to support continued investments in operational efficiency, resilience and excellence.
  • Enthusiasm for agentic AI is highest among CIOs and CTOs, with a majority (53%) viewing it as core to future IT operations.
  • Although automation has become more sophisticated and pervasive across all industries and regions, leaders cite two challenges as the top barriers to broader adoption: mitigating security risks and navigating a talent gap to ensure teams have the right skills and capabilities to drive and support automation across the organization.

In 2024, AI has evolved from a novelty technology to the cornerstone of modern IT operations. Survey respondents reported that they were experiencing the benefits of GenAI across many key performance indicators including:

  • Operational efficiency gains (37%)
  • Improved customer experiences (36%)
  • Better insights from data (38%)

Agentic AI is particularly poised to play a critical role within the next one to two years, with 88% of respondents viewing agentic AI to be either core or peripheral to future IT operations.

Looking ahead, cybersecurity is additionally expected to be a high priority in 2025. 71% of respondents expect an expansion of security and operations budgets in the next year, compared to only 14% who expect to see a consolidation. Security concerns are especially notable in industries that handle valuable intellectual property and emerging technologies. Media (95%) and tech (94%) companies report the highest priority for security. 

Methodology: The report is based on survey responses from more than 1,100 operations leaders across the North American, European, Middle Eastern, and African (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

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CIOs and CTOs View Agentic AI as Core to Future IT Operations

Significant improvements in operational resilience, more effective use of automation and faster time to market are driving optimism about IT spending in 2025, with a majority of leaders expecting their budgets to increase year-over-year, according to the 2025 State of Digital Operations Report from PagerDuty.

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Source: PagerDuty

Survey results include:

  • 64% of respondents expect IT operations budgets to increase in 2025 to support continued investments in operational efficiency, resilience and excellence.
  • Enthusiasm for agentic AI is highest among CIOs and CTOs, with a majority (53%) viewing it as core to future IT operations.
  • Although automation has become more sophisticated and pervasive across all industries and regions, leaders cite two challenges as the top barriers to broader adoption: mitigating security risks and navigating a talent gap to ensure teams have the right skills and capabilities to drive and support automation across the organization.

In 2024, AI has evolved from a novelty technology to the cornerstone of modern IT operations. Survey respondents reported that they were experiencing the benefits of GenAI across many key performance indicators including:

  • Operational efficiency gains (37%)
  • Improved customer experiences (36%)
  • Better insights from data (38%)

Agentic AI is particularly poised to play a critical role within the next one to two years, with 88% of respondents viewing agentic AI to be either core or peripheral to future IT operations.

Looking ahead, cybersecurity is additionally expected to be a high priority in 2025. 71% of respondents expect an expansion of security and operations budgets in the next year, compared to only 14% who expect to see a consolidation. Security concerns are especially notable in industries that handle valuable intellectual property and emerging technologies. Media (95%) and tech (94%) companies report the highest priority for security. 

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OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

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