Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025 Barcelona: Day 3 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. You can read the highlights here from Day 1 and Day 2.

On Day three from the conference, we are revealing the future of cloud, highlighting Gartner's emerging technology vision for 2026, and exploring agentic AI impacts on work. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Presented by Milind Govekar, Distinguished VP Analyst and Chief of Research, Gartner

In 2025, cloud computing principles impacted compute areas, while in 2030 AI is impacting all computing areas. In this session, Milind Govekar, Distinguished VP Analyst and Chief of Research at Gartner, shared how the intersection of cloud computing and AI will evolve in the next five years.

• “Through 2030, cloud providers will raise prices on traditional services to recoup massive investments, with increases being inversely proportional to their success in selling new AI-driven offerings.”

• “In 2030, AI-specific agents will be fundamental to business, so much so that over 80% of critical business activity will be enabled by AI industry-infused agents.”

• “By 2030, over 80% of AI-optimized IaaS spending will support inference workloads, up from approximately 50% today.”

• “By 2030, AI will be a part of over 90% of cloud strategies, up from less than 10% today.”
• “By 2030, securing and governing cloud-related AI activities will be central to over 95% of security strategies, up from 20% today.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Laurence Goasduff at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com. 

Presented by Brook Selassie, VP Analyst, Gartner

The emergence of AI agents marks the next significant wave in AI innovation, disrupting conventional views on what work needs to be done and how it should be accomplished. In this session, Brook Selassie, VP Analyst at Gartner, outlined three potential impacts agentic AI could have on people, processes, policies and decisions.

• Agentic AI could have three permanent impacts on work:

- Agentic AI is the new workflow orchestrator

- Agentic AI is your (governed) decision engine

- Agentic AI is your new digital workforce

• Impact 1: “AI agents transform work into a living system that plans, executes, and improves itself—coordinating people, data, and tools (multimodal) to achieve defined outcomes.”
• Impact 2: “These agents represent a new class of digital labor—autonomous, goal-driven workers that think, act, and collaborate to deliver outcomes at scale.”
• Impact 3: “AI agents execute decisions grounded in verified data and governed logic, ensuring precision and uniformity at enterprise scale.” 
• “Treat agentic AI as a partner, not a tool—govern its judgment, guide its actions, and let it amplify human intent.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Laurence Goasduff at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com. 

Presented by Frank Buytendijk, Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow

Last year Gartner introduced the concept of "hypermachinity," the worldview of taking people out of the equation to create a more scalable, reliable and consistent process, system or business. In this session, Frank Buytendijk, Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow, explored immediate trends, the deeper implications, and the more fundamental questions of where business needs to go.

• “Autonomous business is a strategy that uses self-learning and self-improving technology to automate value creation and delivery. Gartner predicts that by 2035, in at least one industry, the market leader will be an autonomous business.”

• “Operational work becomes managing work –  different job, same people. Through 2035, the proportion of people managing or overseeing operations will grow tenfold”

• “Gartner recommends starting now with digital twins, setting preference for embodied AI agents, and following tokenization technologies.”

• “By 2045, autonomous business platforms and ecosystems each have created their own currency as a way to differentiate and keep their platforms exclusive and unique.”

• “Transformation, in essence, is becoming a better version of yourself. Start with vision. Decide what your organization will look like as an autonomous business. And in that process, realize that your organization first and foremost is a social construct. Keep stressing the human side of serving customers, and the human side for your people.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Laurence Goasduff at laurence.goasduff@gartner.com.