A quarter of the work performed by IT infrastructure and operations people will be handled by AI in the year 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, despite AI also complicating your environment and possibly creating outages.

Those predictions landed on July 10 in Gartner’s 2026 Hype Cycle for AI in IT Operations, the firm’s view on the future of AI-powered infrastructure management tools.

Gartner thinks there’ll be pain before AI-powered automation pays off.

“Many AI-for-IT-operations narratives promise tool consolidation. Agents will query multiple systems, reason across silos and reduce dependence on specialised tools,” the document states, before predicting “the opposite outcome in the near term.”

For at least a couple of years, you’ll have to wrestle with “more layers, more control points, and more specialised observability, orchestration and management capabilities.”

The pain will lessen once “future market and vendor consolidation reduce the overall tooling footprint.”

Between now and whenever that happens, Gartner suggests ops teams’ strategic planning assumptions include the increased likelihood of AI having a role in an outage.

“By 2028, 40 percent of I&O organisations that use agentic I&O at scale in production will experience a business-critical service disruption, up from less than 1 percent of organisations in 2026,” the document states.

You, or your bosses, will apparently be undeterred by that trend. Gartner thinks that by 2029, 60 percent of enterprises will deploy agentic AI as a part of IT infrastructure operations – up from fewer than ten percent today. In the same year, just 20 percent of actions suggested by AI will happen after human-in-the-loop approval, down from 80 percent in 2025. That shift will happen due to increased use of “deterministic guardrails” – policy-driven rules that determine what an AI is allowed to do.

A year later, in 2030, Gartner thinks bosses will have restructured half of all infrastructure and ops teams after investing in agents to handle complex management tasks. In the same year, those of you still working in the field will use AI for every task that humans handle.

“75 percent will be done by humans augmented with AI, and 25 percent will be done by AI alone,” Gartner predicts.

Gartner thinks the following technologies will be mature in the next couple of years, and therefore set us all on the road to this fabulous future:

Forrester warns that customers should brace for bigger software bills next year as software and AI vendors raise prices and pile on usage charges.

Working from a survey of more than 2,600 business and technology decision-makers, the tech research company said software budgets were expected to rise “as vendors increase prices or add usage charges to pass their AI costs to customers.”

In the last six months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing, prompting cost concerns among users. Forrester added Microsoft to the list, citing its recent launch of the premium E7 license, which bolts M365 Copilot, Agent 365, and security tools onto E5.

Last year, consultants Bain & Company estimated that the build cost for AI datacenters would hit $2 trillion by 2030.

Forrester said that AI would drive increases in data and software spending, with 80 percent of decision-makers expecting those budgets to rise.

Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester, said: “The organisations that outperform in 2027 won’t be those that spend the most on AI. They’ll be the ones that invest in the foundations that make AI effective: trusted data, strong governance, organisational readiness, and the ability to continuously adapt as technology and customer behaviour evolve.”

Forrester also found that personnel costs have yet to fall, despite the “AI washing of layoffs” in the tech industry.

“While several tech giants, including Oracle, Microsoft, and Meta, have announced significant layoffs in recent months, IT staffing spend has not declined in recent years,” the report said.

Staffing accounted for 35 percent of IT budgets in 2025. For 2027, 67 percent of tech decision-makers expected to increase their staffing budget, while 23 percent said it would stay flat, and 10 percent expected it to decline. “The AI washing of layoffs will continue as vendors trim for financial and restructuring reasons. Guard against inflated promises that AI can replace employees across the board. Staffing for data/analytics-specific roles is expected to rise, with 68 percent of data technology decision-makers expecting this budget item to increase,” the report said.

Forrester said that organisations should adapt their FinOps practices to help manage the unpredictable costs associated with AI. “Traditional FinOps wasn’t built for token-based, usage-driven AI costs, but that team is certainly best positioned to build these new capabilities and must make this leap in 2027. Fund runtime cost controls such as model routing, semantic caching, and usage guardrails to prevent runaway spend,” the report recommended.

In July, KPMG research found that nearly a third of corporate leaders reported difficulty understanding and controlling operating costs when implementing business AI at scale. “As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organisations are still building the capabilities required to forecast, monitor, and manage AI spending effectively,” the consultancy said.

Enterprises are facing two simultaneous challenges with AI: The risks associated with it are evolving faster than governance frameworks, while the business benefits are often difficult to measure.

This is one of the key findings of The Value of AI, a study commissioned by SAP from Oxford Economics. Now in its second year, the study surveyed 2,600 executives from 13 countries worldwide.

According to new Lansweeper data, as many as 16.9% of Windows client devices, which equates roughly to a total of one in six overall, still runs Windows 10.

While Windows 11 now accounts for 78.8% of installs and Windows 10’s market share has fallen from about 50% in mid-2025, Lansweeper warns the migration is starting to slow down, implying the remaining Windows 10 market share could show no signs of going anywhere.

And that’s a worrying state of affairs, because the average Windows 10 device has around 3x as many active common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) as a Windows 11 device (1,930 vs 652).

Additionally, around two-thirds of the active CVEs on Windows 10 are rated high or critical, and the rate of vulnerabilities known to be exploitable is around 1.7x higher than on Windows 11.

The report notes that Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program buys some breathing room, protecting consumers until October 2027 and paying commercial customers until October 2028.

Healthcare and pharmaceuticals (23%), consumer and retails (23%) and manufacturing (18%) are among the industries most likely to still be running Windows 10, with SMBs (21.4%) more likely to be running the outgoing OS compared with enterprises (16.6%).

Lansweeper also revealed that technical limitations aren’t necessarily to blame, with only 2.8% of the Windows 10 devices it analysed failing Windows 11’s hardware requirements.

More broadly, the report warns that nearly one-fifth (18.7%) of the entire Windows landscape it monitors runs end-of-life operating systems like Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows XP.

The report concludes that, while many users have now upgraded to the latest OS, the remaining estate is smaller but disproportionately more difficult, expensive or risky to update. But with ESU programs soon running to an end, deeper considerations into leaving Windows 10 should be made.

SEIDOR has launched the Report: SAP ERP Modernisation 2026, a study revealing that 94% of companies using SAP plan to modernise their ERP in the coming years.

However, only 15% aspire to a strategic transformation capable of redesigning processes around data and artificial intelligence.

The report is based on interviews with 360 CIOs from companies with more than 100 million euros in revenue across nine countries in Europe and the Americas.

It points to a significant gap between ambition and execution: many companies are modernising SAP in search of innovation, analytics, data and AI, but most projects are still focused on technology migration, operational continuity and platform change.

Javier Navarro, Global SAP Leader at SEIDOR, explained that most companies using SAP already understand that they need to modernise their ERP.

“The difference will lie in whether that modernisation remains a technology evolution or is used to simplify the system, organise information and redesign processes with AI,” said Navarro.

“The risk is not failing to migrate; the risk is migrating and continuing to operate in the same way.”

Allstate Insurance Company has accused Broadcom of haphazardly issuing audits against it because the insurance firm decided not to renew its contracts with VMware and CA Technologies.

The allegations were made in relation to a lawsuit that VMware filed against Allstate in December 2025, according to The Register. In the complaint, Broadcom alleges that Allstate failed to comply with license audits, which Broadcom claims its contract with Allstate requires.

In a June 12 filing, Allstate suggested that Broadcom issued the audits in response to Allstate deciding to end business with its companies. Allstate’s statement reads:

The European Commission is ending an antitrust investigation into SAP after the company made numerous concessions worldwide regarding maintenance and support services for on-premises versions of its ERP solution. The Commission began its investigation in September 2025, concerned that SAP forces customers to buy its services for longer, and for more licenses, than they need.

In accepting SAP’s commitments, the Commission makes them binding on the company. SAP could still face fines if it fails to make good on its concessions over the next ten years. SAP’s promises include:

The UK’s Court of Appeal has dismissed Microsoft’s appeal against a ruling that ValueLicensing (VL) can resell pre-owned software licences.

The judgement, handed down July 7, follows a ruling by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) in November that customers could resell their licenses, even if Office contained clip-art.

In 2021, VL filed a claim accusing Microsoft of stifling the market for pre-owned on-prem software licenses, alleging the US biz baked restrictive clauses into its contracts – essentially, better subscription deals for customers who didn’t resell old licenses. VL sought £270 million in damages; Microsoft denied wrongdoing.

The case later took a turn, when Microsoft attempted to reframe it as a copyright dispute. VL was leaning on the EU’s UsedSoft ruling, which established that secondhand software licenses could legally be resold. Microsoft changed tack and countered that Office’s icons and help files made it a creative work, and thus covered by the Copyright and Information Society Directive rather than the software licensing rules UsedSoft addressed. Microsoft also argued that licenses it had sold in bulk (for example, a 1,000-seat purchase) couldn’t legally be broken up and resold piecemeal by VL.

The CAT rejected both arguments and ruled unanimously for ValueLicensing. Microsoft filed an appeal, and that appeal has now failed.

The judgement is unambiguous on both counts. On copyright, the Court of Appeal agreed with the CAT that Microsoft’s reasoning would lead to “odd results.”

“It would mean that all that was necessary to avoid the effect of UsedSoft would be to incorporate some icons or clip art with the program,” the judgement noted.

As for the subdivision of volume licenses, again, the Court of Appeal sided with the CAT and dismissed Microsoft’s appeal: there’s nothing wrong with VL’s approach.

VL’s Jonathan Horley said in a statement: “I am delighted that the Court of Appeal has given such a clear judgement in ValueLicensing’s favour on both of Microsoft’s appeals. The judgement agreed with all the main conclusions of the CAT on both rulings under appeal as well as clarifying the overall legality of our business model.”

Horley pointed out that none of Microsoft’s arguments succeeded and VL now intends to pursue its compensation claim.

“We are considering the consequences of the Court of Appeal’s judgement for Microsoft’s defence to our claim and will focus in the coming weeks and months on the key procedural steps leading up to a liability trial,” he added.

A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision and will seek permission to appeal. Today’s decision does not address ValueLicensing’s core complaint that we gave customers the option to apply the value of their licenses for older products to new cloud subscriptions rather than selling them to third parties.

“We continue to believe that was both legal and the right thing to do. Helping our customers move to the cloud improves productivity and security.”

Justin Turner KC, the judge presiding over ValueLicensing’s claim, is also overseeing Alexander Wolfson’s collective action against Microsoft. Wolfson was granted permission to intervene in the appeal on March 30, and the judgement noted that “the intervener’s position was essentially supportive of VL’s case.”

That potentially makes today’s dismissal significant well beyond VL’s own claim. The Wolfson collective action, bolstered by this ruling, could expose Microsoft to liability running into the billions, dwarfing the hundreds of millions at stake in VL’s original claim.