5 Major Ways Agentic AI Will Change IT & Data Management
Jason Hardy
Chief Technology Officer for Artificial Intelligence
March 17, 2025
If you work in IT and the phrase Agentic AI isn’t immediately familiar to you, don’t feel left out. You’re not alone.
But just as with its slightly older “celebrity” generative cousin (GenAI), the name will soon be part of your everyday lexicon. Not to mention everyone else's.
Below, we lay out five ways agentic AI will change IT and data management. More importantly, we share what agentic AI will mean to you as an IT leader. We’ll walk you through “A Day in the Life of IT, Agentic AI-Style” to show how it will improve work processes and drive innovation. We explore its ability to proactively manage and automate IT and data resources. Agentic AI will free us up to spend more of our time doing what really matters, creating greater value.
While the tools and technologies to make this happen are still on the horizon, it won’t be long before they make the same transformative impact on our lives as we saw with the launch of ChatGPT.
A Quick Intro to Agentic AI
Think of agentic AI as an army of experts ready to help us conduct business. These experts make decisions, take actions and evolve strategies without our immediate or ongoing intervention. They’re designed to adapt to changing environments by learning and improving upon themselves based on their prior experience. All things considered, these experts are good folks to have by our side.
Generative AI functions by creating new kinds of content – text, images, videos, etc. – based on patterns and structures in the data it’s been trained on. While its name characterizes it as having “intelligence,” GenAI is typically reactive, responding to prompts without understanding the context or the objectives.
One significant difference between agentic and generative AI is their primary use and applications. While agentic AI utilizes generative AI, it takes things further by advising and making decisions on its own in dynamic, real-time environments. Applications could include assisting with customer service or managing a part of an HR organization – all acting as an extension of the workforce.
Five Ways Agentic AI Will Transform IT and Data Management
The advent of GenAI has made IT exciting. But it can also be a bit exasperating at times. Enterprises continue to face challenges with exponential data growth, cybersecurity threats and complexity. The emergence of agentic AI will address them all.
Here are five major ways agentic AI will help streamline things for us IT people.
- Data Classification and Management
Agentic AI can help reduce manual efforts and ensure consistent data from across the enterprise that we can be confident in. It can autonomously categorize, tag and organize data, shortening data retrieval times while gleaning insights from patterns found in enterprise-wide datasets – all in real time. A specific example might be to detect sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII) and automatically add encryption as required, adding significant value (and reducing risk) to the business.
- Proactive Storage Optimization
An agentic AI system can monitor storage use trends, predict and plan for evolving capacity needs, balance workloads and dynamically reallocate resources exactly when and where needed in real time. Optimizing storage resources by preventing over-provisioning and automatically tiering “cold” (rarely accessed) data to older, more cost-effective storage can be both liberating and game-changing.
- Automated Data Governance and Compliance
In addition to organizing and optimizing your data, agentic AI can help govern it. This includes building and enforcing retention policies, flagging compliance risks and ensuring proper encryption, security and protection levels. In addition to enhancing visibility, agentic AI can manage reporting and auditing, all without human intervention. This can be especially valuable in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.
- Predictive Maintenance
With agentic AI, users can proactively automate maintenance processes and scheduling, anticipating and avoiding hardware failures by monitoring key pieces of telemetry, including temperature, vibration and even soft failures. The system can also initiate ordering and shipping replacement equipment or scheduling required maintenance on a fully autonomous basis – freeing IT teams to focus on higher-level strategic tasks.
- Enhanced Data Security and Protection
Agentic AI can excel at detecting and responding to real-time cybersecurity threats, including combatting ransomware and identifying unusual or abnormal data/compute patterns. The systems can autonomously isolate specific data volumes or systems and initiate immutable snapshots, air gaps or backups. Thereby reducing response times and mitigating or preventing damage, often before it can happen.
A Day in the Life of IT, Agentic AI-Style
When talking about the hypothetical benefits of a new IT solution, it’s helpful to imagine how it will impact the daily life of the user. In this case, a data leader at a major global bank.
They start the day by checking their system dashboard, which has categorized and tagged all incoming data overnight. The intelligent data classification system has identified sensitive information, including PII, and automatically encrypted it. This ensures the data is properly organized and secure. Having saved several hours on this task, they work with the finance team to build out a new AI-infused analytics application.
Later in the morning, they receive a system notification predicting the need for additional storage capacity. It’s already automatically relocated resources to prevent immediate over-provisioning. They use the time saved to meet with the analytics team to discuss a monetary transfer solution they’re working on with partners in EMEA.
The afternoon begins with a review of automated data governance and compliance reports. The system has enforced retention policies, flagged compliance risks and ensured proper security levels for all data. They see that a new application doesn’t seem to have the correct compliance flags set. However, because the system understands the data type – through the data classification agent – it was able to inform the governance and compliance agent to correct the improper enforcement. This collaboration between the two agents can be tremendously valuable, particularly in the highly regulated global banking space, ensuring compliance with complex multinational regulatory systems.
Towards the end of the day, an alert notifies them of a potential block storage hardware failure. The predictive maintenance feature of their agentic AI system detected anomalies in the data and scheduled proactive overnight maintenance. Before leaving for the day, they check in with partners on their global data management team to discuss ongoing projects. Then they head to the gym before going home, confident their data infrastructure is safe and secure, and, in the positive impact the team has made throughout the day.
Harnessing the Transformative Power of Agentic AI
This particular data leader’s day may not have sounded overly exciting to anyone outside of IT. But for anyone in it, you know that a day without unexpected problems – where issues have been mitigated before they happen and where you can spend time focusing on more challenging strategic initiatives – is a really great, highly productive day, indeed.
That pretty much sums up the promise and transformative potential of agentic AI. While still on the horizon, agentic AI will not only dramatically improve IT and data management, it will fuel applications that impact our daily lives, both in and out of the office. In doing so, it’ll revolutionize the way we spend our time and find value.
As with generative AI, we can’t exactly predict how the agentic AI journey will play out. But we can be fairly certain it is going to be fun, especially for those who make it work in their favor.
I hope to have a chance to work with you along the way. Reach out.
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Jason Hardy
Jason Hardy is Chief Technology Officer for Artificial Intelligence at Hitachi Vantara
