Ops is bifurcating in two:

* AI-resistant organizations led by graybeards who refuse to send telemetry off-prem (to either observability vendors or to inference providers) and will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the future, over their cold, dead bodies. There's a lot of large, conservative organizations in this category like banks and governments, where budgets are rubber-stamped and Don't Break It If It Ain't Broken attitudes are tacitly approved of.

* AI-accepting organizations where Ops will go through the same great narrowing that Dev is going through now - build the dark factory and let it run. You do still need people who know what good architecture looks like and to shepherd changes to improve the overall system to make it more observable, scalable, and maintainable. You do still need Non-Functional Software Engineers who don't answer to Product, for the sheer political reason that you need people who have a long-term perspective, compared to Product that has a short-term perspective. The business will make decisions like "Vendor X is too expensive so we're migrating to Vendor Y" and you will need somebody to drive the agents to make that happen in a way that respects availability and compliance requirements. You probably don't need, in the long-term, a whole team of people to handle it, let alone a whole group or a whole division.

At the end of the day... focus on being a strong engineer. Somebody will always be needed to take care of the trees.

Org 1 will probably survive better as they will adopt the right primitives - logging, compliance, etc.

Ref: Agent management by Microsoft, AI Gateways springing up everywhere, etc.