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Enterprises Looking to AI for Smarter IT Management

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from global AI-centered technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group (ISG).

The ISG Buyers Guides™ for IT Management, produced by ISG Software Research, find AI plays a growing role in comprehensive software frameworks for IT observability, operations management and FinOps. The need for IT management software is growing, the research says, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures. AI-powered software is also helping enterprises manage and optimize the delivery, performance and responsiveness of IT services.

"IT leaders need effective operations and service management more than ever for resilience and long-term success," said Jeff Orr, Research Director for IT, ISG Software Research. "Enterprises are adopting multiple tools and platforms to support ongoing IT innovation while controlling costs."

Economic pressures, heightened cybersecurity risks and the growing need to support hybrid and remote workers have intensified the need for software that helps manage and operate IT systems and services. CIOs and IT leaders often cite these trends when building a business case for new investments in this area, ISG says.

Enterprises are strategically integrating AIOps, which uses machine learning to automate IT processes, and holistic observability practices, which help companies understand the state of IT systems through their outputs, the reports say. Together, these approaches enable real-time monitoring of application performance and infrastructure health, and provide the ability to predict and mitigate potential issues, allowing companies deliver high-quality IT services with less manual intervention. Through 2026, ISG expects 40% of enterprises to fund AIOps strategies to streamline operations and optimize resources.

AI is enabling IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, the reports say. By 2027, ISG expects software providers to release GenAI-driven tools for processes such as incident management, resource allocation and performance forecasting. GenAI is also changing IT service management, introducing features such as automatic command-line generation to help teams handle service requests.

In the future, agentic AI will enable intelligent workflows with semi-autonomous actions and decisions to manage incidents in real time, ISG says. Self-healing mechanisms driven by agentic AI may be able to resolve issues automatically, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. However, the reports say, enterprises need to be aware of unique challenges involving governance, compliance, business risk and other aspects of these emerging technologies.

As companies move more data and workloads to the cloud, FinOps is becoming a critical tool for managing costs and finances. FinOps strategies foster collaboration among finance, IT and business teams to share responsibility for managing costs and resource consumption. ISG expects one in five enterprises to invest in coordinated FinOps efforts by IT and finance departments through 2026.

"CIO and IT leaders are looking to unify the management of their IT environments and technology services through software made more intelligent with AI," said Mark Smith, chief software analyst and partner, ISG Software Research. "For the first time, our portfolio of IT management software research introduces a unified framework for evaluating software providers and products operating in this space."

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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Enterprises Looking to AI for Smarter IT Management

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from global AI-centered technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group (ISG).

The ISG Buyers Guides™ for IT Management, produced by ISG Software Research, find AI plays a growing role in comprehensive software frameworks for IT observability, operations management and FinOps. The need for IT management software is growing, the research says, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures. AI-powered software is also helping enterprises manage and optimize the delivery, performance and responsiveness of IT services.

"IT leaders need effective operations and service management more than ever for resilience and long-term success," said Jeff Orr, Research Director for IT, ISG Software Research. "Enterprises are adopting multiple tools and platforms to support ongoing IT innovation while controlling costs."

Economic pressures, heightened cybersecurity risks and the growing need to support hybrid and remote workers have intensified the need for software that helps manage and operate IT systems and services. CIOs and IT leaders often cite these trends when building a business case for new investments in this area, ISG says.

Enterprises are strategically integrating AIOps, which uses machine learning to automate IT processes, and holistic observability practices, which help companies understand the state of IT systems through their outputs, the reports say. Together, these approaches enable real-time monitoring of application performance and infrastructure health, and provide the ability to predict and mitigate potential issues, allowing companies deliver high-quality IT services with less manual intervention. Through 2026, ISG expects 40% of enterprises to fund AIOps strategies to streamline operations and optimize resources.

AI is enabling IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, the reports say. By 2027, ISG expects software providers to release GenAI-driven tools for processes such as incident management, resource allocation and performance forecasting. GenAI is also changing IT service management, introducing features such as automatic command-line generation to help teams handle service requests.

In the future, agentic AI will enable intelligent workflows with semi-autonomous actions and decisions to manage incidents in real time, ISG says. Self-healing mechanisms driven by agentic AI may be able to resolve issues automatically, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. However, the reports say, enterprises need to be aware of unique challenges involving governance, compliance, business risk and other aspects of these emerging technologies.

As companies move more data and workloads to the cloud, FinOps is becoming a critical tool for managing costs and finances. FinOps strategies foster collaboration among finance, IT and business teams to share responsibility for managing costs and resource consumption. ISG expects one in five enterprises to invest in coordinated FinOps efforts by IT and finance departments through 2026.

"CIO and IT leaders are looking to unify the management of their IT environments and technology services through software made more intelligent with AI," said Mark Smith, chief software analyst and partner, ISG Software Research. "For the first time, our portfolio of IT management software research introduces a unified framework for evaluating software providers and products operating in this space."

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...