As IT leaders start planning for 2027, IT trends help them prepare.
However, the news on AI changes. One day, AI will take everyone's job; the next day, it will kill us all and bankrupt businesses. Then, there is the good side of AI: the efficiency and possible cost savings.
"You live between these extremes. CIOs will play a huge role in what happens in the future of AI, and that depends on what you make happen now," Kristin Moyer, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, said in the opening keynote presentation at the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando. Gartner released their trends for 2027 at the Symposium.
Here's what IT leaders had to say about the technology trends they are seeing and hearing throughout the tech world, and which ones they think are overhyped and underhyped.
Looking ahead, what IT trend do you think is overhyped, and one you think is underrated?
"How can we mention hype without mentioning AI itself? I think, of course, there are many ways of solving AI challenges. I think a lot of that [is] because they are trying to solve AI from different angles.
And I think what's underrated is understanding what your domain is. … Look at IT and accountability and ownership for AI, because I think organizations are struggling to even find who owns the AI if it misbehaves. And I think that's one of the areas we must look at a little bit closer.
What discipline do you want to attack first? For example, is it AI governance or is it the cybersecurity aspects of AI? And if so, what about it? Is this the identity piece? Is it the network piece? Is this the endpoint? So, for me, it feels like everybody forgot the domains we learned in cybersecurity, and they're just mushing everything together, which I think is a big disservice to the industry."
-Henrique Teixeira, senior vice president of strategy at Saviynt
"Underrated, I think, for sure to me is governance and control of AI agents. If you think about who's the next winner in the AI race, it's going to be about who owns the control tower that sits atop agents across multiple platforms.
When these agents came out, and IBM and all the rest of them came out with them, their agents only talked to their own agents. They didn't play nice with everybody. Now, they have to play nice with somebody, and it's that person who's going to come up on top. That's the control tower and the orchestration layer that has governance, accountability, explainability, rollback and kill capabilities across multiple vendors doing multiple things. And I think that people are sleeping on that right now.
[For overrated], my guess is that I'm tending to get to hyperfixation and a complete fear of data tolls, bridges and tokenization. I think people are really overthinking that they're going to have to put in an entire process to make sure that all tokens are being used, maybe you do for a couple of things here and there, but I just don't think this is going to be a huge problem."
-Eric Helmer, global CTO, Rimini Street
"[What's] overhyped is the idea that we'll have agents for everything. You'll still want a mix of deterministic tools. You want to control risk.
In terms of what's underhyped or undervalued, it is context. So, as we start to put more automation in place, you still need a viable just-in-time context. What's the right information, the right answer, with the right amount of inflection and current in time. Rather than letting your agents dumpster-dive into all these little pockets of information, I think we'll find companies are doing more concerted context preparation, and that context really becomes infrastructure, in large part, sitting over the data layer."
-Janelle Milodragovich, vice president of AI market strategy, Smartsheet
"I think that the overhyped right now is the ability to do everything with AI, right? … We already have solutions for things that are pretty great. Sometimes, you just need an if statement. Sometimes you need code. Sometimes, you just need very simple solutions for things that don't necessarily require a full generative system.
I think the thing that's underrated is thinking cross-functionally with AI applications and agents. There are a lot of companies that offer single-point solutions, and that works for a go-to-market perspective. But when you're thinking about an organization and how your business works -- we as humans don't work in a vacuum, or at least we shouldn't be. We're working with other people. We're working on cohesive strategies, and that's how we should think. I think that's how our agents should work as well."
-Shanea Leven, CEO and co-founder at Empromptu AI
"Liquid cooling has been, I would say, not cared about in the facility being ready. So, the actual trend of expanding existing infrastructure that's not prepared or ready has been forgotten about, and because of that, it's creating a lot of complications for people who want to do something in-house or even in their facility -- sovereign AI or local LLM. It becomes very difficult and very expensive. For the past 30 years, the building's physical infrastructure has always been on the facility, and IT has always worked independently of it.
The overhyped piece – I think AI is replacing jobs. I feel like that hype isn't real. It's not relevant. [AI] is helping people work more effectively rather than taking their jobs. I think it's going to be a long time before people's jobs are taken away. I feel like it's just changing the need for people to be smarter in what they do. If they had repetitive tasks, it would be less important. The same way Excel was when it came out, the same way Google was when it was released. We're a lot more effective today than we were before Google. We're a lot more effective today than before Microsoft Excel."
-Chris Carreiro, CTO, Park Place Technologies
"I think overhyped is probably just this idea that we're going to completely displace roles with AI -- this idea that an AI-augmented process is going to fully replace roles. I think that has backfired. I think in both people's sentiment and in the narrow thinking that sees a role as just a bunch of tasks, and there are many more elements that usually shape a person's responsibilities.
Underhyped or undervalued AI trend? We talk about the application, the use case. I think a lot about the platform itself. How are you building a durable, resilient platform with data that is ready for AI? With the right context, the AI actually knows how to think about that data and how it applies to your business, with the right governance and control in place. So, to me, all those kinds of platform investments are really critical. They're not the things that maybe everyone's excited about or the shiny objects, but to me, getting to a durable platform approach and strategy is what I think about. I need to get those in place so that we can get these use case values out of it."
-Amy Farrow, CIO at Celigo
"The IT trend which is underrated right now is that people are still stuck in the experimentation of AI as a technology. The primary reason is that things are changing so fast. So, I think there is real value in it, and we need to get organized as an organization and start channeling those experiments into real business use cases that could deliver value. So, that's where I see we need to do a little bit more work.
From an overhyped standpoint, there is, from my perspective, a lot of talk about the physical AI we see in robotics and humanoids, and how it is going to change the world. Some people even estimate there'll be one humanoid per person. We are talking about 7 billion humanoids, right? So, I think there needs to be a little bit more rationality and practicality inserted there."
-Rajesh Arora, chief data and analytics officer at Principal Financial Group
Amanda Hetler is senior editor and writer within the Reader Engagement and Outreach team of Informa TechTarget.
