.svg)
.svg)
Gartner IOCS 2025 in Las Vegas brought together IT operations leaders, automation architects, and platform owners from across industries. They were all focused on a common challenge: how to improve productivity and resilience in complex enterprise IT environments.
AI and agentic automation featured prominently throughout the event. Most attendees had a solid understanding of what agentic automation promises, i.e. the ability to respond to emerging requirements and execute multi-step workflows autonomously, vastly accelerating routine operations and reducing manual workload.
That understanding, however, was matched by a strong sense of realism. Conversations revealed less interest in theory-crafting, and a renewed focus on practical application. IT leaders are no longer wondering how their automation efforts could be accelerated with agentic systems in the future; rather, they are asking how automation in general, whether traditional or agentic, can achieve measurable productivity gains at the enterprise level today.
ScriptRunner attended IOCS to understand where organizations are currently seeing value from automation, where they continue to struggle, and what foundations they believe must be in place before advanced approaches like agentic automation can deliver sustainable results.
Core Automation Pain Points: Productivity and Safe Delegation
Across conversations, it became clear that most organizations already rely heavily on automation for routine productivity. PowerShell scripts, scheduled tasks, workflows, and cloud-native automation are deeply embedded in day-to-day operations.
Despite the prominence of AI on the agenda, the most consistent pain points raised were firmly rooted in the organizational challenges of these everyday automation methods.
Two problems surfaced repeatedly:
- Persistent productivity bottlenecks around routine operational tasks
- Limited ability to safely delegate automated tasks beyond senior engineers
These problems are intertwined. In many organizations, automation has been deployed in a fragmented fashion, without centralized governance or consistent controls. As a result, teams continue to rely heavily on experienced engineers to carry out repetitive, low-risk work because automations cannot be shared safely without introducing security, compliance, or operational risk. Scripts often require elevated privileges, lack sufficient auditing, or are unsuitable for execution by service desks or non-technical users.
Of course, this causes senior engineers to become constrained by routine operational workload, automation adoption to slow, and productivity improvements to plateau.
Until these issues are addressed, agentic automation feels less like a technical upgrade and more like an added layer of complexity on top of unresolved challenges.
A Grounded View of Automation Displayed at IOCS 2025: Stabilize First, Then Scale
Many teams have already invested in AI tooling and pilots, only to see performance and trust erode when real-world complexity, security requirements, and compliance constraints come into play.
As a result, rather than pursuing agentic automation for its own sake, many enterprises are shifting towards a measured, grounded approach: strengthen automation foundations first, then introduce agentic capabilities where they clearly add value.
In this view, automation is treated as persistent operational infrastructure to be maintained, expanded, and optimized over time, rather than an ad-hoc productivity tool used by select engineers.
The future of enterprise automation therefore belongs to platforms that prioritize robust governance, stability, and scalability. Agentic automation will undoubtedly play a central role in that future, but only for organizations that establish strong automation foundations first.
Why ScriptRunner Resonated at IOCS 2025
ScriptRunner’s focus on centralized automation and orchestration for Microsoft ecosystems aligns closely with how enterprises want to move forward: solving today’s productivity challenges while preparing responsibly for more autonomous workflows.
It is now commonly accepted that agentic systems amplify the characteristics of the environments they run in, whether good or bad. Before enabling autonomous agentic decision-making at scale, therefore, teams want assurance that execution parameters are consistent, access is tightly controlled, and every action is fully auditable across their automation environment.
ScriptRunner resonated at Gartner IOCS because it provides capability that directly addresses the practical challenges organizations face when scaling automation:
- Centralized execution and orchestration for scripts, workflows, and operational tasks across Microsoft environments
- Safe delegation, allowing automation to be shared without overexposing permissions
- Built-in governance, including rigorously enforced identity-based access control, approvals, and auditing
- End-to-end visibility, so teams always know what ran, who initiated it, and what the outcomes were
By transforming automation into a centrally governed infrastructural layer rather than a collection of disconnected tools, ScriptRunner reduces dependence on individual personnel, while ensuring consistency, security, and performance as automation capabilities expand across teams. This gives organizations the confidence to scale and optimize automation effectively.
The promise of agentic automation fits into ScriptRunner’s futureproof design. ScriptRunner’s architecture provides the governance backbone required not just to scale existing automation capabilities, but also to operationalize agentic automation effectively. Through ScriptRunner, AI agents act within clearly defined guardrails, with enforceable controls and traceable outcomes, the same way human operators should.
In short, ScriptRunner allows organizations to solve today’s automation challenges while laying a secure, scalable foundation for tomorrow’s autonomous workflows, without skipping the crucial steps in between.
Ready to operationalize dependable, futureproof automation infrastructure across the Microsoft ecosystem? Book a meeting with ScriptRunner today.