Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025: Day 1 Highlights with Infor – Walking The Golden Path to Value
Kicking off the first day of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025 in Orlando, this year’s conversations set a decisive tone for the future of enterprise technology. The spotlight was on AI readiness, human readiness, and the rapid emergence of autonomous business, themes that mark a shift from experimentation to finding, capturing, and sustaining AI value. As organizations work to capture measurable AI value while empowering their people, Infor is helping organizations chart their own “Golden Path,” aligning innovation with people, governance, and measurable business outcomes. The pace of change is accelerating, and Infor remains at the forefront, enabling organizations to translate intelligent strategy into sustained value.
Here’s a closer look at the insights shaping Day 1 and how Infor is helping organizations translate Gartner’s guidance into practice.
Walking the Golden Path to Value
According to Gartner, “to achieve the next level of value in AI, CIOs must navigate the blinding hype surrounding AI readiness and the lagging progress of human readiness.”
In the opening keynote Walking the Golden Path to Value, Distinguished VP Analyst, Chief of Research and Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer and VP Analyst Alicia Mullery discussed how CIOs can “chart their own ‘golden path,’ navigating vendor choices, reimagining the workforce and redefining organizational identities to be agents of change.”
Key takeaways include:
- “Avoid the extremes of disbelief and hype regarding AI. Walk the Golden Path of AI readiness and human readiness to find, capture, and sustain AI value.”
- “Enterprises need a dedicated AI leader.”
- “Evaluate AI readiness and find AI value by calculating hidden AI costs and preparing for digital nation states.”
- “Build human readiness and capture AI value by developing critical skills and managing behavioral byproducts.”
- “Sustain AI value by preparing for the era of autonomous business.”
These insights define the balance Gartner calls “the Golden Path” where human readiness is as critical as AI readiness. Infor Industry AI Agents embody that balance, built on the belief that AI’s greatest potential lies in amplifying human capability. Designed to augment people, not replace them, these AI agents embed industry-built intelligence directly into workflows, delivering real-time guidance and contextual insights that help users make faster, more confident decisions in their flow of work. They learn from behavior, surface explainable recommendations, and build trust through transparency, advancing both AI and human readiness in tandem.
Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026
In the session Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026, Gene Alvarez, Distinguished VP Analyst, and Tori Paulman, VP Analyst at Gartner, outlined the technologies CIOs must know to lead their organizations into the future.
Gartner stated that “the top strategic tech trends for 2026 represent more than technology shifts; they are catalysts for business transformation.”
Among them, two stand out as especially relevant for Infor customers:
- Multiagent Systems – “collections of AI agents that interact to achieve individual or shared complex goals. Agents may be delivered in a single environment or developed and deployed independently across distributed environments.”
- Domain-Specific Language Models (DSLMs) – “language models trained or fine-tuned on specialized data for a particular industry, function, or process. Unlike general-purpose models, DSLMs deliver higher accuracy, reliability, and compliance for targeted business needs.”
According to Gartner, by 2028 more than half of the GenAI models used by enterprises will be domain-specific. As Tori Paulman, VP Analyst at Gartner, noted,
“Context is emerging as one of the most critical differentiators for successful agent deployments. AI agents unpinned by DSLMs can interpret industry-specific context to make sound decisions even in unfamiliar scenarios, excelling in accuracy, explainability and sound decision-making.”
Both trends point toward a more collaborative, context-aware future of enterprise AI, one that mirrors how Infor Industry AI Agents are built to operate. These agents function as an interconnected network of domain-specific companions working together to reason, learn, and automate workflows across business functions.
Built upon Infor’s Industry Process Catalogs and Value Maps, these agents draw from a living blueprint of industry knowledge that extends down to the micro-vertical level. The Catalogs and Value Maps capture the process logic, KPIs, and compliance standards that define each industry, enabling the agents to act intelligently within each customer’s business context. Together, they embody Gartner’s vision of AI that is not just powerful, but purpose-built for the realities of modern enterprise.
Autonomous Business: What’s Next After Digital Business?
In the session Autonomous Business: What’s Next After Digital Business?, Don Scheibenreif, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, examined how AI and automation are reshaping “competition, customers, products, operations and leadership.” Gartner defines autonomous business as “a strategy that uses self-improving, adaptable technology to make decisions, take action, and create new value.”
While Gartner envisions a future powered by adaptable systems, Infor sees this as an opportunity to make autonomy practical and human-centered today. Our focus is on enabling technologies that enhance how people work, ensuring that innovation unfolds with governance, context, and intent.
Infor Velocity Suite is the practical bridge between Gartner’s vision of autonomous business and enterprise execution. It’s a package of AI-driven automation solutions and services, combining RPA, GenAI, and Process Mining, that help organizations accelerate process innovation.
Here’s how Infor Velocity Suite connects to Gartner’s key takeaways:
- “Augmented workforce means greater impact.” Velocity Suite accelerates processes through AI-driven automations, helping teams achieve more in less time.
- “AI-powered products are raising consumer expectations.” Velocity Suite drives process innovation, enabling organizations to adapt quickly and unlock new opportunities.
- “Machine customers are increasing.” Velocity Suite orchestrates secure, automated workflows that handle multi-technology interactions seamlessly the Infor Industry Cloud Platform.
- “The programmable economy will monetize new forms of value.” Through process mining and composable automation, Velocity Suite helps businesses discover and capture new efficiencies and growth potential.
Together, Infor Velocity Suite and Industry AI Agents turn the concept of autonomous business into a practical reality, combining AI-driven automation with human expertise to create innovation that is both scalable and trusted.
Looking Ahead
Day 1 set a clear tone: AI value is no longer theoretical, it’s operational. From readiness and governance to process innovation and autonomy, organizations are charting their own golden paths toward measurable outcomes. Infor will continue to share insights from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo throughout the week as leaders explore how human-centered AI and industry innovation are reshaping the enterprise.
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