Gartner's CIO Agenda for 2026: The A.R.T. of Effective Execution

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (0:06)
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Welcome to a new year of Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes-Lockhart. We're kicking things off with the CIO Agenda for 2026, part of one of the largest and longest running surveys of CIOs in the world. This year's results tell a story many technology leaders are already feeling. Budgets are flat, headcount is tight, and yet the expectations for growth, innovation, and AI adoption are rising faster than ever. But the real insights aren't just in the numbers. They're what set top performing technology leaders apart. Agility, risk, and tenacity. Or the ability to push through the troughs when the shine wears off and the hard work begins. You'll hear all of this broken down by Gartner expert Chris Howard from a portion of his CIO Agenda presentation at IT Symposium Expo. He'll walk through how those top performing leaders are rethinking planning cycles, managing geopolitical driven vendor risk, and shifting the conversation from simple productivity gains to deeper financial impact. Now, here's Chris.

**Chris Howard** (1:45)
Welcome back. Hope you're doing well. This session is for you. Of course, all the sessions are for you, but this one is really, really for you. Because this is your data. Those of you that filled out our CIO survey this year, you're going to see the results of that and maybe in a different way than you've seen it before in terms of the story is really about you and where you fit and where you sit from the ability to execute and scope of control and things like that. So if you've seen this presentation in the past, we've done something just a little bit different with it as we'll go through. So that's the goal. 2500 respondents to this, which makes it one of the largest, if not the largest and longest running CIO survey. And we've been doing it, of course, for multiple years, which allows us to look back. But I'm going to give you the headlines. So here we go. Headline first. I had a manager once that said, get the awkward news out of the way right in the beginning. So for some of you, this may not be surprising at all. So we see budget and headcount. So North America relative to global is less and none of it's big. And you take inflation into account there, and it's flat to little. And then you have the pressure of headcount against that. So really not a rise in headcount there. Things are kind of in a hold pattern. We'll talk more about that, because that's actually one of the major features of what's happening here. OK, now, within those decreasing budgets, the amount of spending is going up in some areas. So GENAI, traditional AI, not surprising, these are going up, but you also have spend on security and data and analytics. Having been involved with this survey for a long time, throughout the 2010s, let's say, data spending and cyber spending flipped first and second position for most of that time. And now this has been replaced by AI. Of course, you're feeling it. So no surprise there. So you're spending more on AI while the budgets are flat to down. That has some implications. Then in terms of intent to implement, 41 percent of you saying Agenda.AI. And hopefully, we're not adding to the hype on Agenda.AI, because there's plenty of that out there you don't need anymore. It really is about clarifying what's possible, what they are and so on. So this kind of gives you a sense of where things are. So this is the global picture looking across everybody that responded to the survey. What I want to now do is talk about you as technology leaders and how to become a better technology leader in 2026 So how do you increase your ability to execute and your influence? So maybe it's useful then to think about, well, how do you define a technology leader? People were remarkably honest, I must say, in their responses to this. So clearly, we want to say, what did the top performers have in common? There are lots of things that we tested here. Many things that we tested, and the data showed us that these three attributes, agility, risk, and tenacity, were the things that were most common amongst all of them. Agility, risk, and tenacity. So agility comes in multiple forms. I'm going to take you down a specific path there. Risk is being able to think strategically about risk and tenacity, heroes are made in the trough. It's the tenacity to just keep pushing when things get hard. The nature of the trough of disillusionment is that that's just where the hard work starts, where the shine comes off of the objects, right? And you realize, it's not magic, or you realize maybe AI isn't the solution to this problem at all. Like maybe there are other things, and for some reason we just want to apply AI to all of it. And so those are some of the mistakes that we make. I was in a meeting with one of the biggest banks in the world and their CEO, as I mentioned, you would know, and it wouldn't surprise you. But at the end of the day that we spent with him and his payments folks, we're talking about AI and innovation overall, he said, just do it. Just do it. And there is something about that. But what I want to think about is like, what's the frame of just doing it? Like where am I going to just do it in a way that is actually likely to bring me more success than maybe just doing it in other ways? So we'll talk more about that. The point is, though, by identifying these attributes here, these are things that you can control. You can control these things. You have the control to become a more effective leader in 2026 That's the first message here. Okay. So we get pushback often like, if only I had a bigger budget. If I had a bigger budget, I could do the just do it. I do that. And so we wanted to test that. So you'd think that those that have the biggest budget are the same that have the highest ability to execute. Top performers. So I had my statistics team, fantastic team, that also did all the data for the keynote this morning, light it up. So who has the biggest budget as a percent of revenue? Everybody. It's everywhere. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. In fact, some of you know that having less budget can actually create better innovation. If you have that experience where actually you have a constraint and it forces you to make decisions about what to pursue and what not to pursue, to make those hard types of decisions, that may be partly at what's at play. Okay, so we tested a lot of other things in order to blow up some myths here about what actually makes you better at execution. So if only I had a bigger team, I get a lot more done. If I was in an industry like financial services that could do more or whatever, or maybe a bigger company, I'd have more success. None of those things matter.