Although the technologies businesses depend on continue to evolve, the core responsibilities of the average IT department remain the same. However, what changes is how businesses can best equip their IT departments to carry them out. Recent advances in AI and automation technology continue creating new opportunities for streamlining and enhanced efficiency within the IT sphere. Here are five core IT competencies and how businesses may leverage AI and automation to meet them more efficiently in 2025.
Cybersecurity Operations
These days, business IT departments have no greater responsibility than defending IT assets from attack. Unfortunately, they're increasingly outgunned by AI-armed adversaries. The good news is that businesses now have access to various AI and automation tools to level the playing field. Among the latest tools are agentic AI solutions that can power automated threat response functionality.
Agentic AI can also handle the response decision-making process, unlike previous cybersecurity automation tools. Earlier solutions depended on preset incident response triggers and alerting of human cybersecurity specialists. Agentic AI, by contrast, can begin with a preset goal—like defending a particular server from unauthorized access—and develop its own defense plan. Then, while executing that plan, it can adjust its tactics in real-time based on observed conditions.
Adopting agentic AI solutions for cybersecurity should help businesses close the persistent cybersecurity skills gap they now face. Simultaneously, those solutions should begin lowering the costs of acquiring the remaining necessary workers.
Infrastructure Management
Traditionally, IT departments have devoted significant resources to infrastructure management. In recent years, though, a shift to cloud services has helped relieve some of the most burdensome aspects of that task. It meant that IT teams no longer had to worry about physical infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. Now, a growing move toward infrastructure automation driven by Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is taking things a step further.
Using IaC as the core of an infrastructure management strategy can eliminate the need for IT staff to handle manual provisioning tasks. And many of today's top IaC solutions work natively with multi-cloud deployments. That makes getting started with IaC painless for any business that's already transitioned away from the traditional on-site infrastructure model.
End User Support and Technical Assistance
Operating a help desk and offering other forms of break/fix support is another key competency of the modern IT department. However, it is a function where most businesses no longer need much on-site staff. For one thing, front-line trouble ticketing is now automated by most major helpdesk platforms. Next-generation tools use generative AI chatbots that can resolve many user issues without further escalation.
Most businesses have already turned to outsourcing to staff their remaining help desk positions. Some technical outsourcing companies now custom-trained staff for technology management careers oriented around individual businesses' needs. Even those positions may yet give way to AI call center agents, but the technology required to make that happen still needs refinement.
Data Management
Acting as stewards of business data is another core function of IT departments. However, it is a task that many businesses have turned over to data analytics teams in recent years, with IT departments in a supporting role. However, many IT departments are reasserting their traditional roles as the locus of business data control. They're doing so with AI-powered tools that can turn unstructured data sources into actionable insights.
IBM's Automated Document Processing is a perfect example of that in action. It takes a job that once required a data scientist and turns it into turnkey solutions that almost anyone can use. By applying deep learning techniques, it can analyze troves of data to extract anything it identifies as relevant. Plus, businesses can use low and no-code tools to retrain underlying models to understand almost any data type. Countless other no-code analytics tools can assist businesses in automating their data management and analytics processes.
Collaboration and Communications
Finally, business IT departments remain tasked with providing collaboration and communication tools to employee end users. But that function no longer ends with deploying and supporting relevant apps. It now includes helping build workflow automations that facilitate productive collaborations. For example, They might build automations that delegate tasks automatically once created in a collaboration app. Or, they might automate milestone announcements for defined teams.
Fortunately, most of today's popular collaboration and communications platforms feature native automation tools. Some also leverage generative AI to help users use them more effectively. For example, they may have AI-powered reply suggestions or integrated AI-powered search functionality. Those kinds of timesavers can supercharge employee collaboration and reduce the burden on IT staff to custom-code alternative solutions.
The Next Generation of IT Departments
As today's businesses invest further in IT-focused AI and automation technologies, their IT departments will likely evolve beyond these current roles. They'll become facilitators rather than functionaries. In other words, they'll shift toward integrating autonomous solutions that handle the core functions they perform today. While that outcome is still several years away, one can already see its broad outlines taking shape. However, most IT professionals should have broad experience dealing with the required technologies by then. That should make the eventual transition both natural and smooth, ushering in the next generation of IT departments businesses will depend upon in the latter half of this century.