Gartner Survey Finds 54% of Infrastructure & Operations Leaders Are Adopting AI to Cut Costs

Fifty-four percent of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders said cost optimization is their top goal for adopting AI, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.

The survey was conducted online from May through July 2025 among 253 respondents from the U.S., U.K., India and Germany, to identify the key goals and challenges that heads of I&O face.

Expert Take:

“While AI is the top growth area for future I&O investment, integration difficulties (48% of respondents) and lack of budget (50% of respondents) were cited as top adoption challenges,” said Melanie Freeze, Research Director at Gartner.

Gartner says I&O leaders need to adopt AI intentionally. “Rather than chasing big AI projects, they should start with high-value, feasible pilots and flexible upgrades,” said Freeze. “For example, organizations could use GenAI for cloud cost management to automatically analyze cloud billing, resource usage and infrastructure efficiency.”

Cybersecurity operations and talent/skills development are the second and third most common areas, where many I&O leaders (49% and 48%, respectively) expect to increase their investments in the future (see Figure 1). 

Gartner clients can read more in Benchmark Your I&O Investments to Grow AI and Control Costs.

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference

Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure and operations trends at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conferences taking place November 17-18 in London, December 3-5 in Tokyo and December 9-11 in Las Vegas. Follow news and updates from these conferences on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerIO.

About Gartner AI Use Case Insights

Gartner AI Use Case Insights is an interactive tool that helps technology and business leaders efficiently discover, evaluate, and prioritize AI use cases to potentially pursue. Clients can search over 500 use cases (applications of AI in specific industries) and over 380 case studies (real world examples) based on industry, business function, and Gartner’s assessment of potential business value. Clients can access the interactive tool at https://tools.gartner.com/use-case-insights.