AI Agents Are About to Run Your IT Infrastructure — Gartner Says 70% of Enterprises by 2029

The way enterprises run their IT infrastructure is on the verge of a fundamental shift — and according to new research from Gartner, it is happening faster than most organizations are prepared for.

In its December 2025 report, Predicts 2026: AI Agents Will Transform IT Infrastructure and Operations, Gartner forecasts that by 2029, 70% of enterprises will deploy agentic AI agents to operate their IT infrastructure — a staggering jump from less than 5% in 2025.

From reactive firefighting to autonomous operations

The core of the shift is a change in what IT teams actually do. Today, infrastructure and operations teams spend much of their time in reactive mode: responding to incidents, diagnosing outages, and manually intervening when systems misbehave. Gartner's analysts describe a near future in which AI agents take on the planning and execution of complex operational tasks themselves — automated incident diagnosis, self-healing systems, and autonomous infrastructure management.

In that world, the human role moves up a level. Operators stop being first responders and become supervisors and orchestrators — setting objectives, defining guardrails, and overseeing fleets of AI agents that handle the moment-to-moment work.

Autonomy demands governance

Gartner is clear that this transition is not simply a matter of switching on automation. As agents gain the ability to act independently in production environments, the report stresses that IT leaders must establish governance, guardrails, and performance SLAs for those agents. Increased autonomy raises the stakes for orchestration, auditability, and lifecycle control — the mechanisms that connect an agent's decisions to real execution while keeping humans in command.

In other words, the organizations that win with agentic infrastructure will not be the ones that simply deploy agents fastest. They will be the ones that pair autonomy with the discipline to govern it.

What this means for the next four years

A jump from 5% to 70% adoption in four years is the kind of curve that separates prepared organizations from reactive ones. For IT and operations leaders, the message is to start building the governance scaffolding now — the approval flows, the observability, the SLAs for agent performance — so that when agentic automation becomes standard, the foundation to run it safely is already in place.

Source: Gartner, "Predicts 2026: AI Agents Will Transform IT Infrastructure and Operations," Cameron Haight, Ashish Banerjee, Joe Antelmi, Jonathan Forest, Chandra Mukhyala, 4 December 2025.