Enterprise organizations are grappling with unsustainable tool sprawl. Organizations maintain an average of 254 SaaS applications with IT departments averaging 61 tools — a complexity that hinders both financial performance and competitive advantage. Three-quarters of these tools either duplicate existing capabilities or are nearing end-of-life, creating unnecessary costs and decreasing developer productivity.
To address these challenges, organizations look to modernize and standardize their CI/CD infrastructure, but find the barriers to modernization so expensive and time-consuming that they’re unable to move forward — until now. Organizations no longer have to choose between a resource-draining process and outdated, convoluted systems: agentic AI is making CI/CD modernization a high-ROI opportunity.
The business impact of CI/CD modernization
By consolidating CI/CD tools, teams are able to reduce costs and developers are able to focus on building features instead of maintaining toolchains. Organizations that modernize to a DevSecOps platform like GitLab report:
- 30-40% reduction in total cost of ownership
- 127x faster lead times
- 182x more deployments per year
- 25% fewer incidents with 50% faster resolution times
The barriers preventing CI/CD consolidation
While the benefits of CI/CD consolidation are significant, the barriers to consolidation are often too challenging for organizations to overcome. Due to years of technical debt and business logic built into non-standardized systems, modernization often requires extensive, unaffordable consulting engagements. These efforts have historically demanded a high transition cost with million-dollar consulting agreements.
Companies choose to avoid the time-consuming and expensive process for modernization, pushing off consolidation efforts yet again.
The AI revolution in CI/CD
By automating the most time-consuming aspects of modernization, the incorporation of agentic AI reduces migration time by 81%. The GitLab Professional Services team found that using an agentic AI solution like GitLab Duo Agent Platform helps decrease time to translate because AI agents have context over every file in the repository and even in nearby repositories in the same group structure. Conservatively, a 5x increase in efficiency is expected when using the agentic AI approach compared to human/manual translation.
Your transformation roadmap
By combining the proven benefits of consolidation with AI-enabled implementation, CI/CD modernization can be one of the highest ROI investments in your digital transformation journey.
To help you reach this next stage of software delivery, the GitLab professional services team developed a whitepaper that includes a CI/CD implementation framework with agentic AI, stakeholder communication guidelines, a customer example, and ROI calculations. Download this comprehensive whitepaper to discover how your organization can get started modernizing your CI/CD infrastructure.
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CI/CD modernization: Break down barriers with agentic AI
Key takeaways
- Enterprise tool sprawl hinders productivity. With the average IT department maintaining on average 61 tools, teams are burdened by unnecessary costs and disconnected toolchains.
- CI/CD consolidation and modernization delivers sizable ROI with 30-40% cost reduction, 127x faster lead times, and 182x more deployments. However, significant barriers to modernization prevent organizations from realizing these benefits.
- Agentic AI breaks down barriers to modernization by dramatically reducing translation time and enabling faster implementation at a fraction of historical costs.