All work in IT departments will be done with the help of AI by 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, which thinks massive job losses won’t result.

Speaking during the keynote address of the firm’s Symposium event in Australia, VP analyst Alicia Mullery said 81 percent of work is currently done by humans acting alone without AI assistance. Five years from now Gartner believes 75 percent of IT work will be human activity augmented by AI, with the remainder performed by bots alone.

Distinguished VP analyst Daryl Plummer said this shift will mean IT departments gain labour capacity and will need to show they deserve to keep it. “You never want to look like you have too many people,” he advised, before suggesting technology leaders consult with peers elsewhere in a business to identify value-adding opportunities IT departments can execute.

Plummer said Gartner doesn’t foresee an “AI jobs bloodbath” in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI. He and Mullery did predict a reduction in entry-level jobs, as AI lets senior staff tackle work they would once have assigned to juniors.

The two analysts also forecast that businesses will struggle to implement AI effectively, because the costs of running AI workloads balloon. ERP, Plummer said, has straightforward up-front costs: You pay to license and implement it, then to train people so they can use it.

AI needs that same initial investment but few organisations can keep up with AI vendors’ pace of innovation. Adopting AI therefore creates a requirement for near-constant exploration of use cases and subsequent retraining.

Plummer said orgs that adopt AI should expect to uncover 10 unanticipated ancillary costs, among them the need to acquire new datasets, and the costs of managing multiple models.

The need to use one AI model to check the output of others – a necessary step to verify accuracy – is another cost to consider.

AI’s hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren’t breaking even on AI investments.

Plummer and Mullery nonetheless suggested IT execs pursue AI, and recommended the big four hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba – as key suppliers because they are the equivalent of geopolitical superpowers in terms of their ability to marshal resources and talent. They labelled OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, DeepSeek and XAI “wildcard vendors” and said all are “not enterprise ready.”

Plummer said that OpenAI just hasn’t done the work to create licenses that cautious enterprise buyers need. He said the company has done too little to integrate its offerings with common enterprise software like Microsoft 365, even though that suite’s Copilot AI components rely on OpenAI technology.

The pair also advised IT execs to quickly move past AI-powered chatbots, and instead adopt interactive agents capable of doing things like autonomously conducting negotiations with suppliers.