My post about an article I wrote 22 years ago, along with a question that came up at a recent meeting, got me thinking: what is information technology today? Many colleges already run cybersecurity programs and AI programs, each with its own courses, certifications, and advisory board. IT often gets whatever the other two have not claimed.
I have heard versions of that question for over 40 years. It came up when PCs arrived on desks in the 1980s. It came up again when the internet arrived in the 1990s. The answer changed each time, and it has changed again.
When I started, IT meant hardware you could touch. Minicomputers sat in climate-controlled rooms. Later, servers sat in a closet, cable ran through the ceiling, and a technician fixed a printer by walking to it. The job was installation, repair, and backups on tape.
Three changes moved most of that work somewhere else. Virtualization put dozens of servers on one physical machine. Software as a service moved email, file storage, and business applications to vendors. Cloud platforms let a company rent compute by the hour. Gartner projects public cloud growth of 21.3% in 2026, with the market reaching $1.48 trillion by 2029. Gartner also forecasts worldwide IT spending of $6.31 trillion this year, with IT services above $1.87 trillion and data center systems above $788 billion.
The work followed the spending. IT today (my opinion) covers:
• Cloud and hybrid infrastructure, including cost control, since rented compute bills by the hour
• Identity and access for every user, device, and application
• Networks linking offices, homes, branch sites, and multiple cloud providers
• Patching and configuration across thousands of endpoints
• Data platforms that security and AI teams depend on
• Service management, automation, and vendor contracts
Patching deserves a closer look. The Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found exploited vulnerabilities became the top way attackers got in, at 31% of breaches. Organizations fully fixed only 26% of critical known-exploited vulnerabilities in 2025, down from 38% the year before. Median time to patch rose from 32 days to 43. Patching is IT work. The security team identifies the vulnerability; the IT team deploys the fix to every affected system.
The help desk shows the change inside the workforce. BLS projects computer support specialist jobs to fall 3% from 2025 to 2035 as chatbots take routine troubleshooting. Computer and information systems managers should grow 16% over the same period. Across all computer and IT occupations, BLS expects about 280,000 openings a year at a median wage of $109,470. Entry-level IT now starts with the problems a chatbot cannot resolve.
IT work also moved out of tech companies. CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce 2026 reports that 60% of US tech professionals work for organizations outside the tech industry. CompTIA projects net tech employment to grow 1.9% in 2026 to about 9.8 million workers. In January 2026, about 275,000 job postings asked for some level of AI skill. Massachusetts ranks fifth among states for tech employment concentration at 8.0%.
Cybersecurity and AI both run on IT. A security team enforces access through identity systems that someone built and maintains. An AI model needs clean data, provisioned compute, and network capacity. Remove IT and both groups have policies with nothing to apply them to.
The job numbers point the same way. BLS projects about 14,100 openings a year for information security analysts, about 5% of the 280,000 annual openings across all computer and IT occupations. The rest include software developers and the network, systems, cloud, database, and support roles that IT programs prepare students for. A college that offers cybersecurity and AI programs without an IT program leaves its students out of a large share of those openings.
IT programs are still needed, and they belong alongside cybersecurity and AI programs. Each of those programs sends graduates into organizations that depend on IT staff to build and run the systems being protected or automated. Strong cybersecurity and AI programs make a strong IT program more important. What changes is what IT programs teach, and I will write more about that in a future post.
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| Pic from Nikolas Badminton at futurist.com |
Five-year AI predictions are easy to make and easy to sell this year. The forecasts below come from Gartner, along with Gartner’s own warning about how many of these projects will fail.
Any curriculum built today has a short shelf life, so the more important question is what IT will mean by 2031. The next five years will be driven by AI agents moving into IT operations. Gartner projects that by 2029, 60% of enterprises will use agentic AI in IT infrastructure operations, up from under 10% today. A vendor summary of the same research puts the figure at 70%. Either way, most IT shops will run agents within five years.
The same Gartner research expects only 20% of AI-suggested actions to need human approval in 2029, down from 80% in 2025. Policy-based guardrails will decide what an agent may do. Gartner also expects half of infrastructure and operations teams to be restructured by 2030.
Many of these efforts will stall first. Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 because of cost, unclear value, or weak risk controls. The timeline will slip in places. The direction will hold.
The IT job shifts from making changes to defining, approving, and auditing the changes automated systems make. The skills that gain value:
• Change control: approval gates, rollback plans, and maintenance windows for agent-driven changes
• Non-human identity: permissions for agents, service accounts, and API keys
• Policy writing: turning rules into code that agents must follow
• Logging and audit: reconstructing what an agent did, when, and why
• Cost management: agents consume compute, and compute bills by the hour
• Data quality: agents act on the data they receive, errors included
Networking, Linux, and scripting stay in the core. A technician who understands how a network routes traffic can catch an agent's bad change before it takes down a site.
For educators, this means an IT curriculum has to change on a schedule. A program built now should look different by 2031, with more identity, automation, and agent oversight and less hardware. Employer input and regional job data should drive each update, and the update cycle belongs in the plan from the start.
So what is information technology today? It is the infrastructure, identity, data, and automation work that every other group assumes already exists. Every college with a cybersecurity or AI program needs an IT program to go with it. Over the next five years, IT will also decide what the agents are allowed to do. And someone still has to set up the accounts.
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