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Nearly 96% of IT Professionals Believe GenAI Will Boost IT Productivity

Shamus McGillicuddy

When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution. Given the extreme interest in generative AI (GenAI) and the billions of dollars being invested in the technology,  EMA decided to investigate how enterprise IT organizations are applying the technology to IT operations tasks and processes today.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot IT industry buzzword for many years, particularly in the context of AIOps (AI for IT operations). AIOps is primarily the application of machine learning and other advanced algorithms to IT telemetry data for event correlation, anomaly detection, problem isolation, root-cause analysis, and other operational use cases. AIOps promised to streamline and automate various aspects of IT management, and it continues to gain momentum in the industry.

More recently, the emergence of ChatGPT from OpenAI kicked interest in AI into overdrive. ChatGPT and the countless competing platforms that followed it to market leverage large language models (LLM) to power generative AI, a technology that can produce new content in response to user prompts.

EMA spoke to many IT professionals who are successfully applying consumer-facing, general-purpose generative AI tools to IT operations tasks. The research aimed to uncover how these technologies can be effectively applied to IT management.

Some of the key findings from my new report, <span style="font-style: italic;">Applying Generative AI to IT Operations</span>, include:

■ Most IT professionals are using both general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and generative AI capabilities from their IT vendors.

■ The top challenges with applying generative AI to IT operations are validating quality of AI outputs, managing data quality, and integrating AI into tools and processes.

■ 93% believe it is at least somewhat important for their IT vendors to offer generative AI capabilities.

■ The two biggest potential benefits of applying generative AI to IT management tasks are the optimization of IT service performance and the improved alignment of IT with the business.

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AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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 ...

Nearly 96% of IT Professionals Believe GenAI Will Boost IT Productivity

Shamus McGillicuddy

When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution. Given the extreme interest in generative AI (GenAI) and the billions of dollars being invested in the technology,  EMA decided to investigate how enterprise IT organizations are applying the technology to IT operations tasks and processes today.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot IT industry buzzword for many years, particularly in the context of AIOps (AI for IT operations). AIOps is primarily the application of machine learning and other advanced algorithms to IT telemetry data for event correlation, anomaly detection, problem isolation, root-cause analysis, and other operational use cases. AIOps promised to streamline and automate various aspects of IT management, and it continues to gain momentum in the industry.

More recently, the emergence of ChatGPT from OpenAI kicked interest in AI into overdrive. ChatGPT and the countless competing platforms that followed it to market leverage large language models (LLM) to power generative AI, a technology that can produce new content in response to user prompts.

EMA spoke to many IT professionals who are successfully applying consumer-facing, general-purpose generative AI tools to IT operations tasks. The research aimed to uncover how these technologies can be effectively applied to IT management.

Some of the key findings from my new report, <span style="font-style: italic;">Applying Generative AI to IT Operations</span>, include:

■ Most IT professionals are using both general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and generative AI capabilities from their IT vendors.

■ The top challenges with applying generative AI to IT operations are validating quality of AI outputs, managing data quality, and integrating AI into tools and processes.

■ 93% believe it is at least somewhat important for their IT vendors to offer generative AI capabilities.

■ The two biggest potential benefits of applying generative AI to IT management tasks are the optimization of IT service performance and the improved alignment of IT with the business.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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 ...