Dotun Opasina
Why IT ops engineers are already doing what your strategy can’t mandate
When I started tracking where AI tools were actually being used in client organizations, IT operations lit up the dashboard. Not because of any mandate, but because these teams have something most departments don’t: forcing functions.
At 3 AM, when production is down and your phone is ringing, you’re not thinking about strategic AI initiatives. You’re thinking about solving the problem as fast as possible. If pasting a stack trace into ChatGPT gets you to resolution 10 minutes faster, you’ll do it. If Claude can help you write a monitoring script in half the time, you’ll use it. The forcing function—the urgent need to solve a concrete problem—creates the individual motivation that no strategic mandate can manufacture.
This matters because AI adoption follows a fundamentally different pattern than previous enterprise software rollouts. When we deployed Salesforce or Slack, the value was obvious and immediate: track customer interactions in one place, send messages faster than email. The friction was low and the use case was clear.
