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How to Overcome the Top Two Roadblocks to AIOps Adoption

Sean McDermott
Windward Consulting Group

Digital transformation offers enterprises a multitude of long-term benefits and new opportunities both within and outside of the IT department — such as helping to improve customer outcomes, grow digital revenues, reduce operational costs and launch new products. As part of digital transformation initiatives, IT teams are quickly adopting AIOps solutions to accommodate a new multifaceted infrastructure.

In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that AIOps implementation will see an annual growth trajectory of 15% per year through 2025. However, there are still several roadblocks IT leaders must overcome when adopting AIOps — namely, understanding how to showcase ROI and changing their team's cultural mindset around adopting a new strategy.

Quantifying the Tangible and Intangible

It can be quite difficult to quantify the ROI from a new technology, but in the IT industry, it' a crucial component to adoption. IT operations are a prominent expense to many businesses, and IT teams must be able to justify the additional spend. AIOps is multifaceted, therefore when incorporating it into IT departments, the value should be communicated in a variety of ways through an emphasis on productivity, customer experience and reduced risk — which go far beyond cost savings.

IT leaders are responsible for maintaining high service reliability and reducing risk of bugs and outages — and incorporating AIOps into their operations helps them do so. Also consider intelligent automation taking over operations that often keeps IT talent tied up. With AIOps, these individuals are free to further develop skills and work on projects that add bottom-line value to the business. The immediate visible profit may not be of magnitude, but long-term ROI is achieved by removing the cumbersome, manual monitoring by humans.

Uproot Cultural Mindsets

It' likely IT professionals will go into survival mode when discussions of adopting AIOps begin. A fear of job loss often comes up when evaluating automation and causes employees to be reluctant to the new technology. However, it' important to reiterate that AIOps does not replace IT operations staff. Instead, the technology elevates the department and helps teams handle potential risk exposures. Business executives should lead their teams through workplace change and balance employee expectations when implementing AIOps.

In fact, as companies begin to implement AIOps, the potential of additional jobs will soon follow. We can categorize these roles in two ways – jobs related to developing and working alongside the new technology and jobs related to scaling the business as AIOps' benefits begin to unfold.

The implementation of any new technology within an enterprise can be challenging, but can lead to growth and success when adopted correctly. Successful AIOps initiatives can eliminate manual tasks, enhance scalability, boost collaboration, maximize operational efficiency and help take over mindless tasks of IT professionals for a more fulfilling job. Understanding how to showcase ROI and shift the cultural mindset of your organization will help maximize the value of AIOps.

Sean McDermott is the Founder of Windward Consulting Group and RedMonocle

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How to Overcome the Top Two Roadblocks to AIOps Adoption

Sean McDermott
Windward Consulting Group

Digital transformation offers enterprises a multitude of long-term benefits and new opportunities both within and outside of the IT department — such as helping to improve customer outcomes, grow digital revenues, reduce operational costs and launch new products. As part of digital transformation initiatives, IT teams are quickly adopting AIOps solutions to accommodate a new multifaceted infrastructure.

In fact, a recent Gartner survey found that AIOps implementation will see an annual growth trajectory of 15% per year through 2025. However, there are still several roadblocks IT leaders must overcome when adopting AIOps — namely, understanding how to showcase ROI and changing their team's cultural mindset around adopting a new strategy.

Quantifying the Tangible and Intangible

It can be quite difficult to quantify the ROI from a new technology, but in the IT industry, it' a crucial component to adoption. IT operations are a prominent expense to many businesses, and IT teams must be able to justify the additional spend. AIOps is multifaceted, therefore when incorporating it into IT departments, the value should be communicated in a variety of ways through an emphasis on productivity, customer experience and reduced risk — which go far beyond cost savings.

IT leaders are responsible for maintaining high service reliability and reducing risk of bugs and outages — and incorporating AIOps into their operations helps them do so. Also consider intelligent automation taking over operations that often keeps IT talent tied up. With AIOps, these individuals are free to further develop skills and work on projects that add bottom-line value to the business. The immediate visible profit may not be of magnitude, but long-term ROI is achieved by removing the cumbersome, manual monitoring by humans.

Uproot Cultural Mindsets

It' likely IT professionals will go into survival mode when discussions of adopting AIOps begin. A fear of job loss often comes up when evaluating automation and causes employees to be reluctant to the new technology. However, it' important to reiterate that AIOps does not replace IT operations staff. Instead, the technology elevates the department and helps teams handle potential risk exposures. Business executives should lead their teams through workplace change and balance employee expectations when implementing AIOps.

In fact, as companies begin to implement AIOps, the potential of additional jobs will soon follow. We can categorize these roles in two ways – jobs related to developing and working alongside the new technology and jobs related to scaling the business as AIOps' benefits begin to unfold.

The implementation of any new technology within an enterprise can be challenging, but can lead to growth and success when adopted correctly. Successful AIOps initiatives can eliminate manual tasks, enhance scalability, boost collaboration, maximize operational efficiency and help take over mindless tasks of IT professionals for a more fulfilling job. Understanding how to showcase ROI and shift the cultural mindset of your organization will help maximize the value of AIOps.

Sean McDermott is the Founder of Windward Consulting Group and RedMonocle

Hot Topics

The Latest

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...