By Bill Lobig, Vice President, Product Management, IBM Automation

Generative AI is projected to witness 1B applications by 2028,(1) and public and private cloud services are projected to reach a staggering $219.3 billion by 2027-with on-prem/other investments accounting for another 30%.(2) For perspective, enterprises typically use around 1,000 applications,(3) each with multiple dependencies, and pulling in new data sources, to run their business and keep their employees and customers engaged and updated.

The pressure for organization to rapidly innovate has elevated the importance of modernizing applications, thus leading to an explosion in new applications. In 2025, IBM predicts that a few trends/focus areas will emerge that help support these organizations in the AI era as they build and optimize cloud-native and legacy applications. The key here is automation, and how these organizations can use real-time, AI-driven insights for continuous IT and application management.

AUTOMATION WILL BECOME SYNONYMOUS WITH AI

2025 will be the year for AI initiatives, where AI-powered automation has reached a tipping point from being a nice-to-have to a requirement. Simply put: automation is needed to solve AI's complexity. Organizations can now confidently advance and scale their AI initiatives using automation, moving from spending time managing and maintaining AI applications and IT environments, to proactively detecting and resolving issues. Automating these tasks will be critical for competitive advantage. Next year, you won't be able to have an AI conversation without talking about automation, and vice versa - you cannot have an automation discussion without talking about AI.

AI-DRIVEN TECHNOLOGY OPERATIONS BECOME ESSENTIAL FOR APPLICATION RESILIENCY AND MANAGEMENT

In a world where business impact, service reliability and cost management are paramount, site reliability engineers (SREs) and application owners often struggle with fragmented tools and siloed data, making it difficult to measure or improve an application's resilience, cost, and business impact. What is required is rich application context and an AI-driven platform that enables developers, platform engineers and SREs to proactively and cost effectively manage applications at scale. In 2025, customers will increasingly look to consolidate their disparate point solutions and partner with a strategic provider that can deliver leading AI-enabled, integrated FinOps and Application Performance Management capabilities.

LOW-CODE DEVELOPERS WILL HELP USHER IN AUTOMATION'S TRUE POTENTIAL

Developers, with their technology prowess, will help in the need to rapidly and securely modernize existing applications and deliver new cloud-native applications. Developers will lead the process of securely integrating applications and systems across the ecosystem to remove data silos and power digital transformation. In fact, a key area for developers to excel and lead in is around AI-orchestrated applications. What this means is that APIs will enable AI and AI will enable APIs. This will form the foundation of the connected fabric of the future composable applications, including orchestrated, low-code, pro-code and more. A quick way for organizations to begin on this path is to find a solution that helps developers with prebuilt skills and assistants.

MONITORING SOLUTIONS WILL BE REPLACED BY AI-POWERED, FULL-STACK OBSERVABILITY

Businesses face global challenges, competitive pressures, a tricky economy and rising customer expectations. In 2025, we'll see that as the evolving systems that power today's businesses grow, so, too, does their complexity, with applications, networks, and data more entwined than ever. This begs the question - how can you know how everything is performing, everywhere, all at once? You need to move from monitoring, which tells you when something is wrong, while observability can tell you what's happening, why it's happening and how to fix it. In 2025, we'll see organizations turn to AI-powered, full-stack observability for what I'm calling a "zen-like IT state of mind" - to minimize IT complexity. The true potential of observability is seen through a deep understanding of the relationship between all the infrastructure components (systems, workloads, networks and infrastructure), performance of applications, and quick-turnaround issue resolution.

AI NETWORKING BECOMES USEFUL in 2025

Networks have struggled to get AI models to understand network/telco data to drive business value, but that changes next year. We'll see network teams get both sides to communicate and open up the potential of use cases for AI and network practitioners, especially when it comes to replacing GUI. Just like with AI initiatives, we'll see immediate ROI, but fully expect AI networking to hit full stride in 2026.

Sources:

1. IDC: Gary Chen, Jim Mercer. "1 Billion New Logical Applications: More Background." 
2. IDC. Cloud Climbs, Software Soars: Public Cloud & Software Spending to Reach $222 Billion in 2024, Says IDC
   
3. Salesforce. "Third Edition State of IT Report."