Scaling Agentic AI: Why CIOs Can't Go It Alone

**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, Brandon Germer, on the CIO's role in scaling agentic AI. Returning to CIO Leadership Forum with another standout session, Brandon lays out a stark reality. Agentic AI is already reshaping how work gets done across the enterprise. The real risk isn't getting it wrong, but waiting too long and losing control as AI adoption accelerates outside of IT.
You'll hear why leading organizations are taking a co-led approach, bringing together CIOs, CFOs, COOs, and beyond to build the financial, operational, and governance foundations needed to scale responsibly, and why success depends on shifting IT's role from technology owner to orchestrator of an enterprise-wide AI ecosystem. Now, here's Brandon Germer.

**Brandon Germer** (1:31)
Thrilled to have you join me today. My name is Brandon Germer and I am absolutely excited to be delivering this specific session to you because it is not often that a force like a Gentek AI comes along where the opportunity and the threat of an action are both as great as they are as here. This is an exciting frontier to explore. Exciting, of course, because of what it can mean for your enterprise and unlocked agility, resilience, performance, and innovation, yes. But also for you, if you navigate this well, IT can become the largest supplier of work resources to the whole enterprise through Gentek AI.
But only if you don't go at it alone. Success entirely depends on a co-led approach. That is option A. Option B recognizes that Gentek AI is inevitable. If you don't co-lead scaling the foundations of it with your peers, business unit leaders will absolutely make their own investments. We know this to be true. Already last year, we saw AI budgets jump 52 percent outside of IT, right? And that was coming from a place where on January 1st, 2025, already more than half of the enterprise was using everyday AI to do their jobs. So there's no avoiding it. There's no avoiding it. Option B merely delays confronting the inevitable challenges of FinOps visibility and measuring the business outcomes that matter, and evolving the liability models and risk frameworks around it. Also, Option B forces you into the very unenviable position of party crasher. Nobody wants to be the party crasher. Whereas in Option A, you're positioned as a proactive enabler of scale and change, Option B forces you in a spot where you're received as a threat to innovation and to performance by business unit leaders already grown attached to whatever it is they're trying to deploy. So, there really is only one option. It's Option A, and the day will go to the first movers.
Now, to imagine this and the scale of the opportunity and the threat of an action, it helps to have a good metaphor. I tend to think of this whole situation somewhat as a forest.
So, if you think of yourself, or sorry, all the people in the enterprise as trees in a forest, most senior executives see themselves something like arborists, but you're not arborists anymore. You're much more like ecologists, because there's a whole ecosystem to look after. In a pine forest, below the surface, all the roots of all the trees are indeed connected by this mycelium network, a fungus, that allows the trees to thrive in ways that they just wouldn't be able to otherwise. And agentic AI works a lot like this. We have to go below the surface. So it looks like all of the roots of all the trees are separate, not touching each other, not connected. That isn't the case. There's this mycelium network that's connecting all the roots of all the trees. So again, they can thrive in ways that they wouldn't be able to otherwise. They share nutrients with each other. You cut down a large pine tree, the surrounding trees will keep that stump alive for more than 100 years. If a forest fire starts on one side of forest, trees on the other side know about it and they can harden their bark. Now, agentic AI works like this. There's agents that connect to people. We call them tool mates. There's agents that connect to apps and other agents. We call them the multi agent systems. And together, they work to empower and enable new capabilities in all the humans in the enterprise. Sounds great.