Stonebranch, a leading provider of service orchestration and automation solutions, has officially published the results from its 2025 Global State of IT Automation Report, which was designed to generate comprehensive insights into the evolving priorities, challenges, and strategies of IT automation professionals across North America, EMEA, APAC, and South America.

Going by the available details, this particular exercise would take into account the opinion of 400 IT professionals from organizations with well over 500 employees, spanning across IT Operations, DataOps, CloudOps, and Application Development professionals.

More on that would reveal how the whole survey was conducted in close collaboration with Censuswide.

As for the results, they indicate a dramatic shift in how organizations approach automation, highlighting self-service enablement, hybrid IT orchestration, as well as the growing role of AI and machine learning (ML) in enterprise strategies.

Talk about the given data on a slightly deeper level, we begin from how it discovered a surge in automation investments across the board. The report reached upon this conclusion after 97% of organizations said they plan to expand automation initiatives during 2025. In fact, investment in workload automation/service orchestration (WLA/SOAP) platforms is already up 20% compared to 2024, while cloud automation has also shown similar momentum.

Next up, we must dig into a demand for simpler and more accessible platforms through the enterprise ecosystem. This translates to how a larger chunk of organizations now seek ease of use, intuitive UIs, and SaaS deployment, something they are pursuing by consolidating automation under centralized orchestration layers.

Another detail worth a mention is rooted in how automation emerged as a key catalyst in the context of strengthening business and IT alignment. As a result, more and more line-of-business teams are adopting self-service portals to automate workflows. ERP and CRM systems were discovered, in essence, among the most desired applications to automate, signaling a growing role for business units in automation strategy.

Hold on, we are not done yet, considering we haven’t yet touched upon a piece of data claiming that hybrid IT orchestration is now essential. This is validated by a contingent of 77% enterprises that now operate in hybrid environments like on-prem, cloud, and containerized systems. Beyond that, organizations also showcased patterns of investing in orchestration platforms with broad integration capabilities to achieve unified operations across these complex infrastructures.

Finally, our last piece of finding stems from the way self-service automation is quickly becoming the new standard, mirroring IT Ops teams’ evolution from tactical execution roles into strategic enablers of automation-as-a-service. To give you some context, over 63% of the surveyed companies now have over 200 self-service users.

“This year’s report confirms what we’re hearing from customers around the world — automation is no longer just an IT function,” said Giuseppe Damiani, CEO of Stonebranch. “It’s a strategic enabler that touches every part of the enterprise. As hybrid IT, AI, and self-service automation become the norm, organizations turn to centralized orchestration platforms to simplify complexity and drive innovation at scale.”