Feeding the decades of Gartner research into some kind of AI querying thing would be interesting. Making sense of their reports takes a lot of time, and multi-year trends are hard to pick out. Writing into a chat window that was updated with not only the research reports, but also analyst opinions - maybe notes after inquiry meetings, etc.
I have never been a big user of their inquiry service, but I have a feeling that combining a AI-made custom report/chat session with a human follow up would be something new and valuable.
That said, from what Gartner people have told me over the years, every year they try to do The New Thing (social, video, now AI?) and it never really takes off. Classic innovator’s dilemma I guess.
Also, what I think would be very useful for Gartner to do is setup labs and actually run enterprise software, like a Consumer Reports. Having some benchmarks (common use cases) for incompressible things like comparing different CRM/HR systems, or Kubernetes “distros” would be cool.
Even in the PaaS/container space, just comparing installing, updating the platform, and then deploying a simple three tier app would be cool.
This would be a huge competitive advantage for Gartner. They have the money and time to spend on labs, knowledge of realistic, boring enterprise use cases and vendors would be happy to get them up and running (based on all the effort vendors put into MQ spreadsheets).
You know, “we used five CI/CD tools for three months, and here’s what we learned.” Or “Workday alternatives: we simulated running a 10,000 person company on five alternatives.”
A little bit of agentic AI coding should also make it easier and cheaper for them to run.
Now, Gartner is always predicted to be dying. There’s probably nothing different this time.
Side-note: practitioner wise, the separately managed Burton Group (it has some new name in Gartner “technical advisors”?) seems to be what most people expect Gartner to be: advice about how to run IT, not just industry news coverage.