I look after the Gartner contracts for a large multinational. Am curious as to internal position on AI, with deep research now I can often get better insight from a broader fact base faster and more tailored to what I need. What is the internal talk about using this for better research? Forrester has with their Izola. Also what’s the deal with sales teams, they seem super desperate at the moment, nearly threatening with things like price increase if you don’t renew early, or sign up to this or that, real hard sell, justify to me how you could possibly survive without Gartner etc. is that just my account?
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@1d1 Internally Gartner only rolled out AI tools (behind their firewall) for analysts to use in 2025. To date, the vast majority of analysts have not embraced it as more than a robust search engine. Management from top down is missing in action to drive that change. Look at the research published in 2026 - variation on the same themes with AI added. The reality is many advisors/analysts do NOT recent hands on experience. And training or rotations for experience are not funded. Much of the innovative research is done by a handful of folks, and often after the fact. AI is one example. I was there when GenAI took off in the market. Only then was management pushing we and approving any AI research getting published. Same thing is happening with quantum. When I talk to the analysts covering this topic, they are not looking into its potential at this point - “not there yet.” However, it has gained traction in a variety of markets. Gartner analysts are not making that connection. Don’t be surprised if Gartner gets on the quantum bandwagon after the fact.
@a2 Internally, AI is viewed as a serious threat — middle and senior management know this. Gartner has been late to respond. AskGartner is an attempt to address it, but it’s really nothing more than a search function with some generative AI polish. In reality, clients may use AI to challenge analysts more rigorously, potentially reducing dependency on them for straightforward insights.
Gartner has AskGartner, which is a client-facing tool that has access to all of the content to which a client is entitled - a massive library. It is impressive, and it is getting better over time, but like all GenAI-based software, it can still hallucinate, so every result is accompanied by a recommendation to discuss with an analyst before making a big decision.
With respect to a broader fact base on the public internet, there is some truth to this, if you only want to rely on public information that has been available long enough to be digested by LLMs. The danger is that the fidelity of the output is getting worse over time as more and more of the internet becomes littered with AI slop. Gartner is seeing a growing number of client inquiries where the client is coming in with an LLM-sourced answer to a question and is challenging Gartner to do better; while in some cases they are getting decent answers, in many cases they are getting dangerously bad answers without recognizing them. This is only going to get worse, which is likely to drive a greater need for analyst advice.