UK businesses embracing artificial intelligence to automate IT operations risk creating a new problem dubbed 'console sprawl' — a proliferation of management dashboards that could actually increase system complexity and lead to more frequent outages, according to a new forecast from Gartner.
The research firm predicts that by 2030, a quarter of all IT operations tasks currently performed by human staff will be handled by unsupervised AI agents. While this promises efficiency gains, Gartner warns that the rapid adoption of these tools without proper integration could fragment oversight, leaving IT teams juggling multiple, often incompatible, consoles.
For UK companies already grappling with tight cybersecurity budgets and a shortage of skilled IT staff, the warning is particularly pertinent. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has yet to issue specific guidance on unsupervised AI in IT ops, but the broader regulatory landscape — including the EU AI Act — is increasingly focused on accountability and transparency. UK firms operating across Europe will need to ensure their AI-driven ops tools comply with requirements for human oversight and risk management.
Dr. Helena Croft, a technology policy researcher at the University of Cambridge, said: 'The risk is that organisations treat AI as a silver bullet for IT operations without considering the governance layer. Unsupervised systems can make rapid changes that human operators struggle to track, and when something goes wrong, the blast radius can be enormous.'
For the UK economy, where digital infrastructure underpins everything from banking to retail, the stakes are high. A major outage at a cloud provider or financial services firm could disrupt millions of consumers and cost billions. Gartner's analysis suggests that without careful planning, the very tools meant to steady IT systems could become a source of instability.