‘AI is not making IT simpler – it's making it more consequential’: IT workers are feeling the heat as AI raises expectations

AI is driving significant efficiency gains for IT workers by speeding up tasks, according to new research, but it’s also causing friction and raising expectations.

Findings from SolarWinds’ annual IT Trends Report suggest that AI is making some tasks easier, but rather than reducing workloads it instead increases the amount of strategic and complex work now required.

Around 13% of respondents told SolarWinds that AI has not helped them individually in their day-to-day work.

Seven-in-ten IT professionals said that AI has made their work more demanding, in part by expanding their roles.

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There have been some time savings thanks to reducing manual effort (65%) and faster root cause analysis (61%).

However, now their work also includes making use of AI outputs and designing systems to make it work, such as interpreting data and AI-driven insights (59%), designing AI driven workflows (56%), and evaluating and validating AI outputs (47%).

AI is also adding work due to the need to double-check outputs (71%) and the difficulty trusting recommendations (62%). Because of this, a third say AI has increased "cognitive load" in some ways.

"Seventy-one percent of IT professionals say AI has made their roles more demanding, not less, driven by the need to validate AI outputs, manage governance and risk, and keep pace with tools that evolve faster than most organizations can train for. AI saves time in some places and creates new forms of cognitive overhead in others.

SolarWinds’ findings echo previous research highlighting how AI isn't making work easier but intensifying it. Similar research found workers are now spending half a day each week fixing AI "workslop" — without necessarily boosting wider productivity.

Changing roles and shifting expectations

According to SolarWinds, 80% agreed that their roles were evolving from “operational to orchestration”. Respondents now see their roles as more strategic (52%), automation driven (52%), cross-functional (47%), and complex (41%) than they did two years ago.

"AI is not making IT simpler – it's making it more consequential," said Krishna Sai, Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds.

"The teams thriving in this environment are not usually the ones with the most AI tools. Instead, those who are building the governance and structure to actually trust them are seeing the greatest results. That's what organizations need to get right: not only deploying AI, but also creating the conditions where it can deliver."

One cause of friction may well be a lack of skills and wider AI readiness, according to SolarWinds.

The firm’s report showed that nearly half (47%) of C-suite executives believe their IT team is ready for AI. Meanwhile, just 13% of technical contributors actually doing the work agree with this outlook.

Respondents also disagreed on how positive the impact of AI has been to their company.

One-third said AI has enabled them to increase output without hiring extra staff, while 42% said it allowed performance to be maintained with fewer resources.

That highlights how AI is being used to reduce headcounts or prevent future hiring, with more than a third of UK tech leaders admitting last year they'd made cuts to staff because of AI – though they now regret those redundancies.

But another 20% told SolarWinds that AI has increased expectations without reducing workload – and 5% say they've seen no meaningful impact.

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