SolarWinds today launched an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that is specifically designed to function as a member of an IT operations team.

Dubbed SW1, the SolarWinds AI agent is capable of identifying risks that could lead to service outages and invoking, for example, an existing runbook or script to address them.

Longer term, additional capabilities will be added to also enable SW1 to address service reliability, governance, and resolve issues that it discovers autonomously.

Cullen Childress, chief product officer for SolarWinds, said SW1 is the beginning of a general shift away from AI-assisted IT operations toward a world where AI agents are running IT operations in a way that is augmented by humans. In general, IT teams are still at the beginning stages of that transition, but the general future direction of IT management is clear, he added.

However, that transition may not occur in ways many currently expect. A survey of 1,048 IT professionals conducted by the market research firm UserEvidence on behalf of SolarWinds published today finds a full 80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to becoming orchestrators.

More than half (52%) also noted their role has become more strategic in the last two years, with 41% noting workflows have become more complex.

A total of 81% also agree that AI is changing how teams work more than how much they work, with 71% reporting AI has made their job more demanding. Many, for example, have taken on new responsibilities such as interpreting AI-driven insights (59%), designing intelligent workflows (56%), and validating AI outputs (47%), the survey finds.

However, while AI has reduced manual effort (65%) and enabled faster root cause analysis (61%), survey respondents also noted they need to double-check AI outputs (71%) and don’t inherently trust recommendations (62%).

Only half of respondents say that their organization has embraced AI and automation somewhat (34%) or completely (16%). Well over a third (37%) are either mostly (26%) or completely resistant (11%). Only 12% are neutral.

A full 83% also noted AI is only as effective as the data it can see. The challenge is more than two thirds (67%) are managing fragmented IT environments, the survey finds.

Ultimately, transitioning to relying more on AI agents to manage IT operations is an exercise in change management, said Childress. IT teams will first need to adopt control planes to orchestrate IT agents at scale while at the same time adjusting to fundamental cultural changes that will occur as AI agents evolve into teammates, he added. Exactly how long that will take will naturally vary from one IT team to the next but at this point it is more a question of when rather than if, noted Childress. Eventually, IT service levels will improve while the cost and overall stress level associated with managing IT today continue to diminish, he added.

The challenge now is reducing the amount of time between now and when that goal is actually achieved, given a current state of IT that is often more disorganized than anyone cares to admit.