AI After the Hype: Why Scaling Value Means Quitting More

**Karen Stokes Lockhart** (0:02)
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Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes Lockhart. Today, you'll hear from Gartner VP Analyst Tori Paulman with a preview of the opening keynote from Gartner CIO Leadership Forum. Tori tackles the moment many CIOs find themselves in right now. AI hype hasn't disappeared, but executives are no longer satisfied with experimentation or promises. They want to see value, and more importantly, they want to know how to get there consistently. You'll hear why the organization's making real progress with AI aren't chasing the next breakthrough use case. Instead, they're changing how they decide what to stop, where to double down, and how to lead their teams through the trough of disillusionment. Now, here's Tori Paulman.

**Tori Paulman** (1:17)
I am so excited to be here with you today to talk about AI after the hype. Now, I'm the kind of speaker that wants everybody to go together, so we're going to start with a group exercise. Everyone turn to the person on your right. Hold. I'm kidding.
Now, what we are looking at is two images of human cells. One is healthy and one is abnormal. Now, if there were any radiologists in the room, and maybe one of you is married to one, and they'll go, oh yeah, I see what that is. But if a radiologist would know immediately what they're looking at, and that's because they spend decades learning to discern images like these. Now, that makes them extremely rare. It makes them extremely important. And guess what else, it makes them extremely expensive, which maybe you've learned. So in 2015, researchers ran a study to see if they could train a non-specialist workforce to have the kinds of capabilities to discern these images. And guess what? In only 15 days, they were able to train these trainees to be able to discern these images 85% of the time. And when they were grouped in teams of four, they were 99% accurate. Doesn't that sound amazing? So it turns out that the way that pigeons see images and the patterns in those images is almost exactly the same way that AI does. And by studying how pigeons were able to succeed and fail in discerning these images, they were able to discover how AI might succeed and fail. Now, if we all agree, like let's just like table, like level set the table here. I think we would all agree that even if pigeons are accurate 99% of the time and even if they work for literal breadcrumbs, none of us want them to be our radiologists, right? Of course not. But if we looked at the value of this study through that lens, replacing radiologists with pigeons, like it would seem a little bit like a joke. And we might want to call the folks over at the NIH and find out what else they're doing with our tax dollars.
But if we take a broader perspective and we look at it through the lens of creating a decision playbook for where AI could be effectively and safely used in the form of radiologists, this would then free radiologists up. So same goal, different perspective. Now, today's theme will be a broader perspective is simply put, a better perspective. Now, good news, pigeons are the least of your worries. When we asked the IO what their top concerns are, they said their top concerns are cyber security, the IT strategy, these are perennial concerns. But then the next three are generative AI, agentic AI, AI.
If it feels like I'm yelling AI, AI, AI, I get it. That's how it feels to us these days too.
And that means that this premise of being AI after the hype, well, it's a little bit of a head scratcher, right?
Now, if you're thinking that right now, you're not wrong. In fact, Gartner forecast show that over the next three years, spending on AI by you and your peers globally will reach nearly $5 trillion.
So trying to prove the value of a spend that's larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on earth is gonna take what? A broader perspective. So to do that, we looked at our 2026 data. Now our data on CEOs showed a pattern. If you take these two data points and put them together, what do we see? We see that CEOs are thinking of AI as the single most transformative technology to become more competitive. But there's an even broader perspective. When we looked at our 2026 survey data on boards of directors, we found they don't just want you to get dollar for dollar back what you're investing in AI. They want organizations to take greater risk with AI.