Gartner series #2- Agents of Change and IT Resilience in the Age of AI
September 16, 2025
4 min read
September 16, 2025
4 min read
Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant horizon. Enterprises are already experimenting with predictive analytics, generative automation, and advanced data platforms. Boards expect visible progress, customers anticipate innovation, and competitors are investing heavily. Yet while AI takes the spotlight, the reality inside many organizations tells a different story: budgets are strained, legacy infrastructure is creaking, and resilience is weaker than leaders want to admit.
This paradox is becoming more acute. Organizations want to move faster with transformation, but their ability to do so is limited by fragile systems, vendor-dictated upgrade cycles, and teams whose talents are tied up in keeping the lights on. True leadership in this moment requires more than enthusiasm for AI. It requires intelligence: the discipline to make decisions that strengthen resilience while creating space for innovation.
When Gartner selected the theme “Agents of Change: Leading Through Intelligence” for its 2025 Symposium, it wasn’t simply pointing to dashboards or algorithms. Leading through intelligence is about how executives think, prioritize, and act. It is about resource stewardship—how budgets, systems, and people are managed to balance stability with transformation.
It also means challenging long-held assumptions. Vendor timelines are not business priorities. Activity is not progress. And constant upgrades are not the same as resilience. Intelligent leadership requires executives to separate myth from mandate and focus resources where they truly deliver business value.
Risk is the lever vendors use most effectively. End-of-support dates are framed as existential vulnerabilities, leaving organizations feeling that upgrades are the only safe path. But every major migration introduces risk of its own: outages, integration failures, new attack surfaces, and months of operational disruption.
Origina CEO and Founder Tomás O’Leary, in his Forbes Technology Council article, “Surviving The GenAI Infrastructure Crunch Requires Technological Independence.” observed that the industry’s obsession with constant upgrades is driving wasteful demand at a moment when capacity is already stretched. Every pointless migration adds strain to global infrastructure, consumes unnecessary energy, and ties up resources that could be invested in innovation. In other words, forced upgrades don’t just waste budget—they actively weaken resilience.
Resilience does not come from perpetual change. It comes from choosing the right changes, in the right places, for the right reasons. Intelligent leaders explore alternatives to the binary “upgrade or risk exposure” mindset. Independent support models extend the life of stable, secure systems, providing breathing room without disruption. Targeted engineering solutions address specific vulnerabilities instead of disturbing entire estates. Layered security controls—segmentation, monitoring, hardening—often provide more effective protection than an expensive migration.
These approaches free budget and reduce disruption. More importantly, they allow enterprises to redirect energy toward transformation initiatives: modernizing customer experiences, embedding AI into workflows, and automating manual bottlenecks. Resilience is strengthened by focus, not by defaulting to vendor cadence.
The most overlooked element of resilience is people. Every time an enterprise commits to a vendor-led upgrade, its best engineers and architects are drawn into months of low-value work. These are talented professionals who could otherwise be experimenting with AI, redesigning processes, or solving customer problems. Instead, they are firefighting compatibility issues and validating migrations.
Intelligent leadership treats this as a critical opportunity cost. Shrinking the change bucket doesn’t just release budget—it unleashes human potential. When teams are free from repetitive upgrade work, they can focus on projects that genuinely move the enterprise forward. This cultural shift is just as important as the technical one. Resilience is not just about systems remaining online; it is about people feeling empowered to contribute their best work.
CIOs may manage the technical mechanics, but the mandate to lead through intelligence rests with the CEO. Technology is no longer just a support function; it is core to business strategy. CEOs must therefore demand a higher standard of justification for IT spend. They must ask: What business value does this upgrade create? What risk does it actually reduce, and at what cost? What alternatives exist that are less disruptive and more efficient?
By asking these questions, CEOs shift the culture from compliance to stewardship. They empower their technology leaders to think creatively, and they send a clear signal to boards and investors that vendor timelines do not dictate enterprise destiny. This is what separates organizations that react to change from those that lead it.
Consider the example of a healthcare provider facing a vendor mandate to upgrade its scheduling platform. The project was projected to take more than a year, during which clinical operations risked disruption. Instead of defaulting to the vendor’s path, leadership sought alternatives. Independent support was engaged to maintain security and compliance. A targeted enhancement was developed to address the specific regulatory driver of the upgrade. The IT team was then able to dedicate its reclaimed time to an AI initiative that improved patient flow and reduced wait times.
The result was resilience achieved on two fronts: operational stability was preserved, and innovation moved forward. This is the essence of leading through intelligence—not choosing between resilience and transformation, but enabling both simultaneously.
As executives gather in Orlando this October, AI will dominate the conversation. But beneath every discussion about models, tools, or platforms lies a deeper issue: how can organizations build resilience while investing in transformation?
The answer is not bigger budgets or faster upgrade cycles. It is intelligent leadership. Shrinking the change bucket is not neglect—it is strategy. Allocating resources based on risk is not radical—it is stewardship. Empowering people to innovate instead of patching is not reckless—it is resilience.
Gartner’s theme of “Agents of Change: Leading Through Intelligence” captures this shift. It calls for leaders who can balance today’s stability with tomorrow’s opportunities, not by spending more, but by spending smarter.
The enterprises that thrive in the AI era will not be those who blindly follow vendor road maps. They will be those who lead through intelligence: reframing risk, resisting unnecessary upgrades, and empowering people to build the future.
Agents of change don’t just reduce risk—they create resilience.
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