IT operations already have automation: scripts, runbooks, RMM, orchestration. Agents add a planner that can choose tools from a prompt. That is powerful for investigation. It is reckless as an unsupervised executor on production identity and firewalls.
Use traditional automation when the path is known: patch rings, certificate renewal, account disable on leavers, backup verification. Those jobs need determinism, logs and a boring schedule. An agent that “decides” to skip a ring is not a feature.
Use agents when the path is not known yet: correlating an incident across Azure Monitor, a firewall log and a change ticket; proposing a remediation; drafting a plan a human approves. The value is compressed investigation time, not removing operators.
The control plane matters more than the model. Tool permissions, environment isolation, approval gates, and an audit record of every call. If you cannot say which identity the agent used to reset a password, you do not have an operations system. You have a liability.
North Ark builds agents against existing operational systems — not as a replacement for them. If a workflow is already reliable in code, leave it in code. Put the model on the messy edges.
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