IDC PeerScape: Practices for Implementing Agentic AI-Enabled Intelligent Infrastructure

This IDC PeerScape explores best practices for responding to the most frequent challenges confronting early adopters as they work to deploy agentic AI-enabled intelligent infrastructure capabilities into production IT environments. Specifically:Lack of trust in agentic AI-enabled systemsBuilding the business caseEnsuring organization-specific context Providing visibility for compliance and audit requirementsTransforming IT staff, skills, and processesThe five best practices for successful agentic AI-enabled intelligent infrastructure deployment and operations discussed in this document are distilled from a series of early enterprise adopter interviews conducted as part of the research for an IDC Special Report: Insights from Early Users of Agentic AI for Intelligent Infrastructure (IDC #US53897125, November 2025). Collectively, they emphasize the need for ongoing human involvement, customization using high-quality internal data, and extensive use of policies and guardrails to ensure that intelligent infrastructure solutions operate in compliance with business rules and IT governance requirements."Intelligent infrastructure infused with agentic AI reasoning and automation will rapidly transform many aspects of computing, storage, network, and cloud operations and optimization," explains Mary Johston Turner, research vice president, Digital Infrastructure Strategies at IDC. "The ability of IT teams to transition from today's domain-specific, human-led infrastructure operating models to more intelligent and autonomous infrastructure platforms will directly impact how well organizations can support the IT needs of the business going forward while ensuring performance, security, and reasonable total cost of ownership."