Tuesday 12th December 2023
By Ben Clark
Going to the ‘About Us’ page at Gartner.com, you will find the following statement:
“Gartner delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams.”
Yet elsewhere, it states Gartner is a superior information technology (IT) research and consulting firm. So, what exactly is Gartner?
I ask the question because two weeks after the Gartner Barcelona Symposium in 2022, Chat GPT was launched; you may have heard of it! I believe that they had a CEO vacancy that they filled in 3 days. That must be some form of record! Anyway, what I found most interesting was that in 2022, Gartner’s main trend was the Metaverse or evolving/expanding of immersive experiences. It was ubiquitous throughout the keynotes.
That was the technology trend of 2022 that Meta had effectively “bet the farm on”. Like every Symposium I have ever been to, the Metaverse was the theme of that particular year; Gartner always has one that permeates every single seminar you attend to the point of saturation. However, fast forward to 2023, and I did not hear one mention of the metaverse or expanding immersive experiences, other than the Saudi Arabian 2030 ExPo is available in the Metaverse (only because of the huge adverts they had) and a few vendors peddling their wares.
I am quite certain that by 2027, 30% of investments will not be in reimagining the experience of work in the Metaverse; I am not aware of one. AI is mentioned, of course, but the focus is more on sustainability than anything else. To be fair to Gartner, Forbes and McKinsey were predicting a multi-trillion-dollar industry. I did find quite a bit on NFT’s, too, so the less said about that, the better!
Going back to my original point, Gartner barely mentioned AI last year. Yes, it was there in the trends, but it has been every year since I first attended. It certainly was not a focal point and there was no indication of what was coming. As you can imagine for a company full of the smartest people in the room, there was no acknowledgement of this in any way. They just brushed over last year’s Metaverse-focused Symposium like it never happened. Wouldn’t you love to know what was said in private…
Images courtesy of Gartner.
What I think Gartner really are, is a trends company. They speak to leaders across the globe and find out what their problems are, ask them how they solved a particular issue, what technologies are considering and then replay these answers back via their very bright analysts, as insight and research. However, they appear to be repackaging what they hear. Otherwise, they would not have been caught so cold by the launch of Chat GPT. This is not my view alone, but one held by many CIOs and Chief Architects I spoke to at Gartner.
You would have expected a $5.5 billion research company to have seen the biggest technology revolution since the internet coming, wouldn’t you?
Images courtesy of Gartner.
Even before the launch of AI, nearly every company that Konvergent works with wants to be a data-driven company. There is only one slight problem with that – years of neglect and under-investment in foundation data means that most companies are most certainly not data driven, let alone ready for AI. Even if you are ready for AI, it is not going to come without significant investment (what will you remove from your roadmap?) and will most likely contradict your own sustainability goals, which is a higher concern for CIOs in Europe than anywhere else in the world.
To be AI-ready, data needs to be enriched for the job you want it to do, and the metadata is as important as the data itself, but how many companies are ready? I did hear some stories from a few medical companies and Aldi, who had achieved some outstanding things with AI. However, the retailers have been at the forefront of this for some time. Konvergent hosted a Roundtable in 2018 with the Head of Data Architecture at the Very Group, and everyone in the room was astounding of how far ahead they were than anyone else. Nearly 6 years on it does make for quite interesting reading.
This is one snippet from our 2018 blog:
“Machine learning needs data. The data must be readily available and relatively current, as well as relevant. If you missed the big data bandwagon a few years ago, you’re going to need to plan your data capability now.”
So, to get your data ready for AI, you are likely to have to do a significant amount of pre-AI investment. This is not the news that your board is going to want to hear. Mind you, I suspect you already know this.
I think that during my 5 days in Barcelona, the average ‘go-to-sleep time’ must have been 1am, far, far too late for a man entering his dreaded middle-ages. When you add constant meetings, walking and learning on top, it can completely drain you. I must have been asleep by 9pm when I arrived back in the UK, a near 12 hours sleep to recharge!
It is very much worth it though, as it is the only time of the year when so many of Konvergent’s clients are together in the same place, at the same time, without the worry of getting home due to train strikes and cancellations!
If you have not gone, I would highly recommend it, and hopefully, I will see you in 2024.
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