Highlights From Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024

Many CIOs are responsible for spearheading their company's AI strategy. In the opening keynote, Distinguished VP Analysts Mary Mesaglio and Hung LeHong highlighted the emerging challenges that CIOs encounter when striving to deliver AI value safely and at scale. They include:

• Balancing AI hype and reality: Navigating the dual pressures of rapid AI innovation and the challenge of delivering tangible AI outcomes.

• Managing AI costs: Understanding and controlling AI investments and expenses, which can be unpredictable and significantly higher than anticipated.

• Ensuring AI productivity: Addressing the uneven distribution of productivity gains across different roles and experience levels within the organization.

• Building trust and governance: Implementing robust governance and trust mechanisms, including TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management) technologies, to ensure safe and reliable AI deployment.

CIOs must navigate the complexities of AI developments while driving sustainable growth in their organizations. Gartner Distinguished VP Analysts Kristin Moyer and Don Scheibenreif outlined five key shifts that CIOs must focus on to drive growth and ensure their companies are AI-ready. They are:

• Geographic expansion: Diversify and spread risk across different locations with a significant focus on mergers and acquisitions.
• Customer capacity and value proposition: Re-evaluate customer value propositions in light of increased price sensitivity and the potential for AI-driven personalization.
• Risk management and security: Build robust risk management and security capacities to support growth and mitigate new risks introduced by AI.
• People capacity: Integrate human employees with AI and robotic technologies to enhance productivity and operational efficiency.
• Operating model: Reimagine operating models to be more agile and AI-ready, enabling autonomous operations and faster decision-making.

In this session, Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, Chief of Research and Gartner Fellow, revealed ten predictions that CIOs can act on today to ensure a smooth transition into the future. From the predictions, four major themes emerged:

• AI is a combinatorial disruption. Don’t waste time trying to separate it from other trends. Instead, build an AI discipline for each high-priority business function. 
• AI is altering relationships between employees and employers as it is used to mimic employee personas, influence moods and affect behavior. 
• AI is increasingly being used to oversee and combat other AI because there are not enough humans to be in the loop of AI governance and oversight. Agentic AI, for example, can act autonomously. 
• AI is influencing board decisions and organizational design as it provides insights into and advice for organizational operations.

With digital initiatives recording a disappointing 48% success rate, CIOs and IT executives need to understand the “curse of random success” and find strategies to break it — including working closely with other members of the C-suite to co-own digital delivery. Jaime Capella, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst, revealed what should be on the CIO’s agenda for the coming 18 months, given CEOs’ and other CxOs’ shifting expectations for CIOs, CIOs’ demands for their leadership role and the mandate of the IT organization.

In 2025, focus on: 

• Providing easy-to-use, compelling platforms: Invest in foundational technologies within cybersecurity, AI, and analytics. Ensure platforms are accessible for all technologists, not just those in IT.
• Instilling architectural awareness among all technologists: Provide education on managing tech vendors, costs and cybersecurity.
• Co-creating innovation with business areas: Actively involve business leaders and staff in digital innovation. Only 18% of CIOs currently enable this kind of involvement.
• Developing business and IT technologists: Expand efforts to include technologists across business areas. CIOs who work in multi-disciplinary fusion teams help business areas forecast digital skills and develop digital leadership.

In his presentation of the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Gene Alvarez highlighted how CIOs and other IT executives can explore and selectively use these trends to drive success. The 2025 trends are:

• Agentic AI
• AI governance platforms 
• Disinformation security
• Post-quantum cryptography
• Ambient invisible intelligence
• Energy-efficient computing
• Hybrid computing
• Spatial computing
• Polyfunctional robots
• Neurological enhancements 

Download your detailed guide to the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025 and learn how they align to your digital ambitions.