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:

Gartner has slammed AI vendors’ lack of transparency, saying developers are facing sharply increased costs from coding agents.

Since the main AI coding agent vendors have shifted from seat-based licensing to consumption-based pricing, developer teams now face highly variable cost structures.

Developer teams face an emerging problem of escalating costs, said Nitish Tyagi, senior principal analyst at Gartner. AI coding bills were leaping from $20 or $100 to $2,000 to $5,000 per developer per month, while in extreme cases, the bill might hit $20,000 in token charges.

However, software engineering departments get little insight into how token consumption is calculated and billed, making it difficult for them to forecast and control costs accurately. AI coding vendors have not yet delivered built-in features to allow developers to optimise costs in AI coding agents, resulting in cost escalation, Gartner said.

“None of the vendors have incredible features when it comes to cost optimisation,” said Tyagi. Instead, he said vendors were focusing on the concept of “tokenmaxxing” to “boost the high” of token consumption, suggesting that if

developers increase the number of tokens, they will increase productivity gains.

“There is no direct relation between the increase in token consumption and an increase in productivity gains,” he said.

Gartner recommends developer teams optimise token consumption and adopt strategies such as context engineering practices, where software engineers improve the input context provided to AI systems. Another recommended strategy is model routing, where engineering and platform teams direct simpler, high-frequency tasks to smaller models, using frontier models only for complex, high-value work

“All of these things will improve the output quality, and, therefore, will increase the productivity gains as well, so while there is no direct relation between tokenmaxxing and productivity gains, there is a relation between optimisation of token consumption with the output quality,” Tyagi said.

As a result of the lack of cost optimisation tools among vendors and consumption-reduction strategies among users, AI development is in a situation where a developer’s coding agents may cost more than they earn, at least in some parts of the world. Gartner predicts that by 2028, AI coding costs will overtake the average developer’s salary due to rising LLM token consumption and the shift to consumption-based licensing models.

“We’re not saying AI token cost will be higher than every developer’s salary on the planet, because US salaries tend to be higher than in India, for example. But current token costs are already more than most of the salaries in India,” he said.

However, the cost of coding agents does not vary according to where they are consumed, meaning AI coding costs for a developer in India may be equivalent to the salary of an engineer with four to six years’ experience, Tyagi said.

“We’re not saying AI token costs will be higher than every developer’s salary on the planet, because US salaries tend to be higher than in India, for example,” Tyagi said, adding that token costs do not vary by location, and in India they may already be equivalent to the salary of an engineer with four to six years’ experience.

Organisations that decide to reduce their VMware footprints, or quit entirely, will emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure.

That’s the view of Paul Delory, a research vice president with analyst firm Gartner, who told the company’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney that there is no technical reason for VMware users to adopt a rival hypervisor, and that no vendor offers a one-for-one replacement for the virtualisation pioneer’s flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite.

But Delory said Broadcom’s licensing policies, which see it only sell VCF, mean VMware users’ licensing bills typically rise by 300 to 400 percent. Broadcom argues that the full-stack private clouds VCF makes it possible to build are so efficient that VCF quickly pays for itself.

The analyst told the conference he thinks those contemplating a move off VMware will do better if they instead focus on application modernisation. But he said Broadcom’s price changes, and the prospect the company might hike prices again in future, mean many VMware users will look elsewhere.

Those who do, he warned, will end up with more complex infrastructure for two reasons.

One is that few organisations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.

The other is that no rival hypervisor can match the efficiency or VM density possible when using VMware’s products, so moving means acquiring more hardware.

Delory said the best alternatives to VMware are the public cloud, or HCI vendors – these days that acronym denotes both hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The analyst warned that HCI vendors, with the exception of Nutanix, have weak migration tools that will leave users needing to create bespoke migration automations using “Ansible and a Rube Goldberg machine.”

Public clouds, he said, will welcome customers who move 1,000 or more VMs with free migration services.

He recommended against considering OpenStack, which he said remains “too big, too complex, and has too many moving parts for the typical IT shop to handle effectively.”

Delory also warned VMware users that migration projects are significant engineering undertakings that require extensive assessment of every application in a fleet to determine its best destination, and the work required to get it there.

He reminded VMware users that not every workload is certified to run under non-VMware hypervisors, and that some vendors now offer cloud-native versions of their wares and therefore offer an easier on-ramp to containerised applications.

Delory advised exploring those options, and not making architectural decisions that mean you can’t consider moving off VMware.

“VMware is betting that you can’t move off and they can jack the price way up,” he said. “That may be a good bet. But don’t make it easy.”

The analyst finished his talk by predicting most users will minimise their VMware footprints, rather than eliminating them, and restated Gartner’s prediction that 35 percent of workloads currently running under VMware will operate on a different platform by 2028.

It’s not possible to operate a completely sovereign cloud outside of China or the USA, according to Douglas Toombs, a VP analyst at Gartner.

Speaking at the analyst firm’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, Toombs said only the US and China make all the tech needed for a sovereign cloud. Buyers elsewhere can’t avoid relationships with foreign providers.

Toombs said that while US-based cloud vendors have created products they say can meet the needs of organisations that need a cloud that doesn’t have legal entanglements outside their chosen jurisdiction, the fact they’re ultimately owned by American corporations means it’s not possible to be certain a cloud provider can promise complete sovereignty.

Even on-prem clouds like AWS Outposts, Azure Local, or Oracle’s Dedicated Cloud Regions, “need to phone home,” he said.

The analyst doesn’t think attempts to create sovereign clouds will succeed. He mentioned past French attempts to create sovereign clouds named “Andromeda”, “Numergy,” and “Gaia-X”, which he says went nowhere – but did produce some nice white papers.

He also cited the The Rule of Three and Four, a maxim developed by Boston Consulting Group that asserts “A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest,” and argued that it predicts the cloud market has settled around AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Toombs allowed that some smaller clouds could thrive and will make it feasible to create sovereign SaaS providers and products.

But he thinks that even aggressive moves to go on-prem won’t free organisations from dependency on US-owned clouds, an assertion he backed with the example of a Dutch healthcare provider that tried to build its own infrastructure but then experienced an outage when a supplier’s services went down along with a major cloud provider.

If sovereign clouds fail to develop, it may be problematic because some European organisations are worried US-based cloud operators might leave the continent, forcing them into hasty and risky migration projects, according to Adrian Wong, a Gartner Director Analyst who also spoke in Sydney.

Wong said “heightened geopolitical tensions” are causing customers of major clouds to rethink their strategies, a decision he welcomes because he sees very few organisations bother to develop a cloud exit strategy.

“Exit plans are overlooked,” he said, and users are “very much locked in” – especially when they use cloud-native services or platform-as-a-service.

“Exiting within a timeframe of anything less than two years takes significant planning and investment,” he warned. “Exit strategies and plans are largely swept under the rug.”

Wong says he is now seeing “the pendulum swing.”

Not developing a cloud exit strategy is one of the ten big mistakes Wong sees users make. Also on his list are starting use of clouds with mission-critical and complex applications like ERP, assuming the cloud is appropriate for all applications, and expecting to get all the benefits of the cloud with every application.

He also said it’s folly to assume that going multi-cloud will improve availability – unless users first tackle the more complex and expensive task of making applications portable. Wong said organisations that use multiple clouds should do so to access specific features of each, not to improve resilience.

VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.

Speaking to discuss the analyst firm’s mid-April publication, “The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026,” Galimberti said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue’s big iron comes out ahead.

“I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronisation and high availability are things I need to build into application logic,” he said. “The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity.”

He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility.

That said, Galimberti doesn’t recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM’s hardware.

IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux “even better and more enterprise-ready.”

Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM’s ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs.

Galimberti said he has seen “multiple business cases” in which moving from VMware to IBM makes sense under Broadcom’s policy of requiring customers to buy its full Cloud Foundation private cloud stack. The analyst said he was surprised those business cases make sense, but insists a mainframe makes sense “under some circumstances.”

AI is another workload Galimberti thinks some users will find works well on mainframes, because IBM recently upgraded its Spyre accelerators

The analyst says items like Spyre show that IBM continues to invest and innovate, and that the mainframe “is not a stale platform.”

Galimberti said the idea that mainframes were a dead end has been around for decades and was justifiable at some moments in history. But he also feels the idea was oversold by consultants who promoted migrations away from mainframes as sure-fire winners – but under-estimated the complexity of a move.

“Global system integrators were always against the mainframe and encouraged migrations,” he said. “Now they are halting the mainframe exit, probably because the number of failures they had were more than their successes.”

The firm now advises assuming that by 2030, 75 percent of vendors offering mainframe exit services operating in the “mainframe exit” market will either change their businesses or vanish, and suggests that only 10 percent of mainframe users will want out by 2030.

Which is not to say mainframes are perfect or easy to live with. Galimberti noted that few third-party software developers support mainframes, and those that do understand the potential to hike prices.

Committing to mainframes therefore means planning “to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritising the business value these solutions can deliver.”

Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customisations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform.

Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don’t contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.

The analyst thinks the mainframe will be around for some time to come, because IBM is “very engineering-focussed” and “engages with customers who are hyper-conservative” – then just creates the products they want.

Citius, Altius, Fortius. More than a slogan, “Faster, Higher, Stronger Together” is a phrase etched in the minds of many IT decision-makers. Technology is essential. Nobody wants to fall behind. Doing so could mean losing out on many advantages and, consequently, significant business.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that Gartner forecasts global IT spending to reach $6.31 trillion this year, a 13.5% increase compared to 2025 — and nearly 3% more than Gartner forecasted in February, at 10.8% growth.

A sustained push in AI infrastructure, software, and IaaS is key to this growth, according to the research firm. “These shifts are reinforcing a multi‑speed IT market, with hyperscaler purchases and AI‑centric software segments significantly outperforming more traditional categories,” Gartner reported in a statement.

John-David Lovelock, analyst and distinguished vice president at Gartner, underscored that accelerated momentum in AI infrastructure and advanced memory played a significant role in the firm’s growth revision.

“As AI workloads scale, datacenter investment is ramping rapidly, which in turn is driving increased demand for high‑performance compute,” Lovelock said in the statement. “This dynamic is creating meaningful growth opportunities for companies delivering AI‑optimised processors, accelerators, and enabling technologies.”

What will grow the most? Spending on datacenter systems, at 55.8%, to exceed $787 million in 2026.

Supply constraints and strong demand have also resulted in record price increases for high-bandwidth memory, according to Lovelock, as hyperscaler demand drives sharp increases in investments in servers. “These trends collectively make AI infrastructure the most attractive segment for capitalising on the robust expansion in IT spending,” he said.

Those same higher memory prices are impacting device replacement cycles, according to the firm. Device spending is growing, to be sure, but at a lower rate (8.2%) than the IT sector overall.

“Together, these dynamics highlight a widening divergence across IT markets, as AI infrastructure and GenAI software see substantial upward revisions while device growth reflects ongoing cost and pricing pressures,” Lovelock noted.