Gartner's inevitable death
To sell expensive beautifully drawn maps in a world post GPS
Forrester, IDC and Gartner (“FIG”) are credit ratings agencies of enterprise software, turning opinions into gold through the alchemy of Magic Quadrants and Waves.
And for Gartner business booms: $5.9B in revenue, with research margins that would make a luxury brand blush at 74%.
The genius of the model is its absolute circularity.
Vendors pay to be rated.
Enterprises pay to read the ratings.
Everyone pays to gather at conferences to discuss these ratings and strike deals
A perpetual motion machine of profit, spinning faster than each new technology wave.
The numbers tell the story of their absolute dominance. Each technology client drops an average of $260K annually – that's about five seats at $50K each, just to read PDFs.
A whopping 70% sign multi-year contracts.
The research business alone rakes in $4.9B or 85% of their total. Not bad for a company where only 12% of employees are actual analysts.
What Gartner sells isn't research – it's insurance. Like McKinsey BCG & Bain, they've mastered the art of selling corporate bulletproof vests.
When the project fails (and they often do), you can always point to the Magic Quadrant and say, " But Gartner said..."
It's the perfect product for a world where enterprise software bought and sold via seat-based licenses takes years to implement and even longer to prove worthwhile.
Enter AI agents
The problem isn't that agents are overhyped (they are) or that the market is chaotic and can’t even agree on a definition (it definitely is).
The problem is that agents will fundamentally break Gartner's model of value through opinion.
When you can deploy a customer service agent that handles tickets at $2 instead of $20 for a human, you won’t need a six-figure subscription to tell you it's working. The proof is in your P&L, not a PDF.
This is the existential threat.
The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. — V. 20
Their entire business is built on making an illegible market legible through the power of curated expert opinion.
But agents flip the script – they will make technology outcomes more immediately measurable.
Why care about being labeled a "visionary" when you can prove ROI in near real-time?
The future isn't in knowledge-as-a-product, it's in results-as-a-service.
The marketplace won't need expensive middlemen telling them what's good – they'll have platforms showing them what works.
Performance metrics will replace expert opinions.
Benchmarks for specific nuanced workflows will trump brand names.
Sure, Gartner still has their conferences – those high-stakes networking events where deals are struck over coffee and PowerPoints. And yes, enterprise habits die hard, especially when they're padded with other people's money.
The inertia of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" still has life left.
But the economics will be brutal and inexorable.
Where Safe No Longer Matters
When outcomes become measurable in days instead of years, the value of expensive opinions plummets.
When you can A/B test agents against real business problems in real-time, who needs a Magic Quadrant?
Gartner made its fortune predicting technological disruption and will struggle in defending the disruption of its own business model.
They're still selling maps in a world of GPS – expensive, beautifully drawn maps, but maps nonetheless.
The winners in this new world will be:
The open marketplaces that offer transparent performance metrics and direct, outcome-based comparisons.
They won't need to sell safety – they'll sell results.
They won't need to cultivate mystery – they'll provide clarity.
Look, Deep research is already free.
The knowledge Gartner guards behind paywalls will be increasingly available in the open or near open, created by practitioners rather than industry analysts.
Case in point,
’ s review of Month with Devin.Gartner won't disappear overnight. They’ve weathered PR storms before.
They're too entrenched, too profitable, too much a part of the enterprise furniture. But their moat will evaporate, one measurable outcome at a time.
The question is how long they can maintain the illusion that opinion matters more than results.
In the end, even the most magical of quadrants won’t compete with a simple spreadsheet showing ROI.
And that's a disruption no amount of analyst coverage will prevent.