Gartner Survey Finds All IT Work Will Involve AI by 2030; Organizations Must Navigate AI Readiness and Human Readiness to Find, Capture and Sustain Value
Analysts Explore How CIOs Can Use the Gartner Positioning System to Walk the Path to Value During Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025, October 20-23
By 2030, CIOs expect that 0% of IT work will be done by humans without AI, 75% will be done by humans augmented with AI, and 25% will be done by AI alone, according to a July 2025 survey of over 700 CIOs by Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company. This means that organizations need to focus on a combination of AI readiness and human readiness to ensure the right balance to achieve value from AI.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251020095027/en/
Source: Gartner (October 2025)
During the opening keynote of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, which is taking place here through Thursday, Gartner analysts told the audience of over 7,000 CIOs and IT executives that few organizations are doing this.
"Gartner has been guiding CIOs and IT executives on their AI journeys for many years. In 2023, we showed them how to shape their AI ambition. Last year at IT Symposium/Xpo, we explained how to pace themselves in the AI outcomes race. This year, we're mapping out the right path for them to take so they can go all-in on AI value," said Daryl Plummer, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner Fellow and Chief of AI Research for the Gartner High Tech Leaders and Providers practice.
"While not all AI is ready to deliver value, humans are even less ready to capture value," said Alicia Mullery, VP Analyst at Gartner. "AI readiness means AI can help you find value and effectively meet the needs of specific use cases. Human readiness is about whether you have the right workforce and organization to capture and sustain AI value."
Transform the Workforce to Capture and Sustain AI Value
Gartner's position is that AI's impact on global jobs will be neutral through 2026. By 2036, AI solutions introduced to augment or autonomously deliver tasks, activities or jobs will result in more than 500 million net new human jobs to support new AI initiatives.
"AI is not about job loss. It's about workforce transformation. CIOs should start transforming their workforces by restraining new hiring (especially for roles involving low-complexity tasks) and by repositioning talent to new business areas that generate revenue," said Plummer.
Restraining hiring will help to enhance productivity and optimize costs, but to capture new value, more needs to be done. The workforce needs to be able to work with AI in radically new ways. The skills they need are going to change.
"AI will make some skills, such as summarization, information retrieval and translation, less important, as AI is ready to automate or augment these tasks," said Mullery. "But AI also creates a need for entirely new skills. These AI skills are fundamentally different from most skills. Where skills were traditionally about doing tasks better, AI skills are about making you better — a better motivator, a better thinker and a better communicator."
Gartner analysts said that organizations' skills development plans should go beyond training people in new skills. If people rely too much on AI and stop using their core skills, skills atrophy can happen. Workers should be tested periodically to make sure they are retaining critical skills for important roles.
Find AI Value Through AI Readiness
AI readiness should be evaluated in terms of costs, technical capabilities, and vendors:
- Costs: In a May 2025 Gartner survey of 506 CIOs and other technology leaders, 72% of CIOs reported that their organizations are breaking even or are losing money on their AI investments. For every AI tool organizations buy, they should anticipate 10 hidden costs plus the transition costs of training and change management. Organizations should conduct an analysis and decide which costs they'll fund.
- Technical capabilities: Some AI capabilities, such as search, content generation and summarization, are ready. Other capabilities, such as AI accuracy and AI agents, are not. If organizations don't get the technical capabilities right, value returns will be fragile and prone to failure. For example, when considering AI accuracy and AI agents, organizations should focus on building their own AI accuracy processes and piloting autonomous, multiagent AI systems that can help reinvent processes and generate revenue.
-
Vendors: Determining the right vendor for an organization's AI needs is dependent on the type of AI implementation:
- If an organization is planning a massive rollout of AI, hyperscalers have the AI infrastructure scale to support a wide range of outcomes.
- For industry-specific use cases, start-ups can offer domain-specific AI agents, in-depth knowledge and capabilities that can deliver immediate benefits.
- For rapid innovation and leading-edge AI capabilities, AI research and development companies are innovation-ready but don't quite have the raw scale to be enterprise-ready.
- Every AI decision made is a sovereignty decision, so don't ignore AI sovereignty.
Gartner has identified four perspectives to assess how ready organizations are for every initiative they pursue. This system will help guide organizations on the path to AI value by gauging whether technology and human talent are ready to achieve their AI ambitions (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The "You Are Here" Gartner Positioning System (Example Position)
"Following the Gartner Positioning System, organizations can seek to find, capture, and sustain AI value. If they are successful, they can transcend their limitations," said Plummer. "AI creates shockwaves which might make college education no longer necessary, which might turn a hospital into just a treatment center, or which might make it easier to predict the future. But the real payoff comes when AI solutions are focused on improving the core competencies of an organization or solving impossible problems."
Gartner clients can learn more in Walking the Golden Path to Value: 2025 IT Symposium/Xpo Keynote Highlights.
About Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo is the world's most important gathering for CIOs and other IT executives. CIOs and IT executives rely on these conferences to learn how to become agents of change in their organizations and harness AI for successful digital transformation. Follow news and updates from the conference on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerSYM, and on the Gartner Newsroom.
Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo include:
October 28-30, 2025 | Yokohama, Japan
November 10-13, 2025 | Barcelona, Spain
November 17-19, 2025 | Kochi, India
About Gartner AI Use Case Insights
Gartner AI Use Case Insights is an interactive tool that helps technology and business leaders efficiently discover, evaluate, and prioritize AI use cases to potentially pursue. Clients can search over 500 use cases (applications of AI in specific industries) and over 380 case studies (real world examples) based on industry, business function, and Gartner's assessment of potential business value. Clients can access the interactive tool at https://tools.gartner.com/use-case-insights.
About Gartner for Information Technology Executives
Gartner for Information Technology Executives provides actionable, objective insight to CIOs and IT leaders to help them drive their organizations through digital transformation and lead business growth. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/en/information-technology.
Follow news and updates from Gartner for IT Executives on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerIT. Visit the IT Newsroom for more information and insights.
About Gartner
Gartner (NYSE:IT) delivers actionable, objective business and technology insights that drive smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization's mission-critical priorities. To learn more visit gartner.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251020095027/en/
Matt LoDolce
Gartner
[email protected]
Meghan Moran
Gartner
[email protected]