A Practical Roadmap for Trustworthy Agentic AI in IT Operations

AI agents are starting to handle real IT operations tasks such as inspecting services, correlating alerts, and preparing remediation steps. The article argues that being technically able to execute an action is different from being ready to do so in production, so teams must define what authority an agent should hold and what evidence is needed to expand it. It recommends assigning autonomy by task risk, weighing reversibility, blast radius, verifiability, and sensitivity rather than relying on model capability. It outlines four levels of autonomy, from observe-only through recommend and act-with-approval to acting within defined bounds. Read-only tasks such as health checks are presented as the safest starting point for delegation.