Majority of CIOs and CTOs view Agentic AI as core to future IT operations

PagerDuty has published the 2025 State of Digital Operations Report, which demonstrates the excitement for the business impact that AI and automation have delivered. Based on survey responses from more than 1,100 operations leaders across the North American, European, Middle Eastern, and African (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions, the data highlights how efficiency, security and innovation are among the top priorities shaping IT operations in 2025.

The fourth edition of the State of Digital Operations Report showcases the continued maturation of digital operations over the past year, with respondents citing significant improvements in operational resilience, more effective use of automation and faster time to market. The improvements respondents reported are driving optimism about IT spending in 2025, with a majority of leaders expecting their budgets to increase year-over-year.

State of Digital Operations Survey Results

64% of respondents expect IT operations budgets to increase in 2025 to support continued investments in operational efficiency, resilience and excellence.

Enthusiasm for agentic AI is highest among CIOs and CTOs, with a majority (53%) viewing it as core to future IT operations.

Although automation has become more sophisticated and pervasive across all industries and regions, leaders cite two challenges as the top barriers to broader adoption: mitigating security risks and navigating a talent gap to ensure teams have the right skills and capabilities to drive and support automation across the organization.

“PagerDuty’s 2025 State of Digital Operations Report shows that AI has rapidly grown to become the backbone of digital operations, helping reduce toil, improve resilience and drive tremendous efficiency,” said Katherine Calvert, chief marketing officer at PagerDuty. “With PagerDuty, organizations can more easily integrate AI and automation into their operations to grow revenue and drive efficiency while building resilience and reducing risk.”

In 2024, AI has evolved from a novelty technology to the cornerstone of modern IT operations. Survey respondents reported that they were experiencing the benefits of GenAI across many key performance indicators including:

Operational efficiency gains (37%)

Improved customer experiences (36%)

Better insights from data (38%)

Agentic AI is particularly poised to play a critical role within the next one to two years, with 88% of respondents viewing agentic AI to be either core or peripheral to future IT operations.

Looking ahead, cybersecurity is additionally expected to be a high priority in 2025. 71% of respondents expect an expansion of security and operations budgets in the next year, compared to only 14% who expect to see a consolidation. Security concerns are especially notable in industries that handle valuable intellectual property and emerging technologies. Media (95%) and tech (94%) companies report the highest priority for security.