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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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...