By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | December 12, 2025
Gartner’s Latest Predictions
This week, Gartner released “The Gartner 100+ Data, Analytics & AI Predictions Through 2031″—a sweeping set of forecasts about what technology will do over the next six years.
The highlights:
- By 2027: 75% of CDAOs who haven’t established themselves as “strategic collaborators” will lose their C-level positions
- By 2028: GenAI and RPA will automate 40% of content migration between analytics platforms
- By 2026: 60% of existing dashboards will be replaced by GenAI-powered narratives
- By 2029: D&A organizations with profit-and-loss models will secure 15% more funding
Their framing: “Disruptive change is accelerating, and data, analytics, and AI are at the core of transformation. Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
That last sentence is revealing. Let me repeat it:
“Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
Gartner has been selling “what’s next” for decades. If organizations are still struggling to plan after 40 years of Gartner predictions… maybe the problem isn’t a shortage of predictions.
The Measurement That’s Missing
Here’s what confuses me: Gartner creates the Hype Cycles and predictions that the market treats as authoritative. Their frameworks are considered accurate. Their analysts are quoted as experts. Their Magic Quadrants influence billions in purchasing decisions.
But what do Hype Cycles actually measure?
- Technology maturity ✓
- Market attention ✓
- Vendor positioning ✓
- Feature capabilities ✓
What do Hype Cycles not measure?
- Implementation success ✗
- Realized benefits ✗
- Organizational readiness ✗
- Absorptive capacity ✗
In other words: Gartner measures everything except the only metrics that actually matter to organizations.
A technology can be at the “Plateau of Productivity” on the Hype Cycle while 60-80% of organizations fail to implement it successfully. The Hype Cycle doesn’t capture that. It was never designed to.
So when Gartner says a technology is “mature” or “ready for mainstream adoption,” they’re making a statement about the technology’s capability—not about whether your organization can absorb it.
The Procurement Insights Counter-Archive (1998-2025)
While Gartner has been forecasting technology capabilities, I’ve been documenting organizational outcomes.
The archive begins not in 2007 when Procurement Insights launched, but in 1998—when the Canadian government funded my SR&ED research into agent-based relational acquisition modeling for the Department of National Defence.
The DND Results (1998-2001):
- Delivery accuracy: 51% → 97.3% (46.3 percentage point improvement)
- Administrative overhead: 23 FTEs → 3 FTEs (87% reduction)
- Cost savings: 23% reduction
That methodology—which prioritized organizational readiness over technology capability—produced results that the technology-first approach has never matched at scale.
What the archives document across four technology eras:
Four eras. Technology capability increased exponentially. Across cases documented in the Procurement Insights archive, the observed success rate remains stubbornly low—and the pattern persists.
The Divergence: Promise vs. Reality
Here’s what the data shows when you map the technology promise trajectory against documented implementation reality:
[INSERT LINE GRAPH: “The Prediction Gap: 1998-2031”]
The graph tells the story:
- Technology Promise Curve (analyst + vendor narrative) rises steadily, projecting ever-increasing transformation potential
- Implied Adoption Success (market expectation) assumes adoption will follow capability
- Observed Success (documented by Procurement Insights archive) stays flat at 20-30%
- The Gap between promise and reality widens with each technology generation
The only data point that breaks the pattern: 1998 DND deployment—where readiness assessment preceded technology selection, and success reached 97.3%.
Note: Gartner “Predicts” are strategic planning assumptions (SPAs), not audited forecasts. This chart visualizes the recurring promise-vs.-adoption gap documented across the Procurement Insights archive.
Gartner’s Own Warnings Acknowledge the Gap
Here’s what makes this particularly revealing. Even as Gartner publishes optimistic predictions about what technology will do, they simultaneously warn of significant failure rates:
- Reuters reported (June 2025): Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by 2027
- Gartner has warned of major washout rates across AI initiatives, with many projects abandoned after proof of concept
- Gartner’s own research acknowledges that lack of AI-ready data and organizational preparedness are primary failure drivers
These aren’t my critiques. These are Gartner’s own cautions—published alongside their technology predictions.
So in the same breath, Gartner tells organizations:
- Here’s what technology will do by 2031 (the predictions)
- Many of you will fail trying to implement it (the warnings)
The predictions create urgency. The warnings create consulting engagements. But neither addresses the core question: Is your organization ready to absorb this change?
This isn’t a criticism of Gartner’s integrity. It’s an observation about what their frameworks were designed to measure—and what they weren’t.
What the Predictions Never Include
Look at Gartner’s 2031 predictions again. What’s missing?
- No prediction about organizational readiness to absorb these technologies
- No prediction about the human capacity to manage the change
- No prediction about what happens to the 60% who fail
- No prediction about why “many organizations struggle to plan”
The predictions are all about what technology will do. None are about whether organizations can absorb what technology does.
This is the structural blind spot I’ve been documenting since 2007—and researching since 1998.
The 18-Year Archive: What It Actually Shows
The Procurement Insights archives (2007-2025) contain nearly 3,000 articles documenting a consistent pattern:
Theme 1: Process Archaeology Before Technology
From the first posts in 2007 through today: understanding behavioral patterns and organizational readiness must precede technology selection. Technology that outpaces organizational capacity creates failure, not transformation.
Theme 2: The Equation-Based vs. Agent-Based Divide
Organizations fail when they treat procurement as mathematical optimization rather than understanding human behavioral patterns. Gartner’s predictions are equation-based. Reality is agent-based.
Theme 3: The Persistent 75-85% Failure Pattern
Documented consistently: high failure rates due to technology-first approaches ignoring organizational behavioral readiness. This number hasn’t improved despite four generations of technology advancement.
Theme 4: The Vendor-Analyst-Consultant Revenue Chain
The industry’s failure rate persists because no one in the revenue chain gets paid to say “stop—you’re not ready.” Predictions drive urgency. Urgency drives deployments. Deployments drive failures. Failures drive remediation consulting.
Theme 5: Readiness as the Missing Variable
Every technology era promises transformation. Every era delivers the same failure rate. The missing variable isn’t better technology—it’s readiness assessment.
The Question Gartner Can’t Answer
Gartner’s post says: “Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
My question: If Gartner has been providing “what’s next” predictions for 40 years, why are organizations still struggling to plan?
The answer isn’t more predictions. It’s that predictions about technology capability don’t address organizational readiness.
You can predict that 60% of dashboards will be replaced by GenAI narratives by 2026. That prediction tells you nothing about whether your organization can absorb that change.
You can predict that CDAOs who aren’t “strategic collaborators” will lose their jobs. That prediction tells you nothing about how to build the organizational capacity for strategic collaboration.
Predictions describe futures. They don’t create readiness for futures.
What the Next Six Years Will Actually Look Like
Based on 27 years of documented patterns, here’s what the Procurement Insights archive suggests for 2025-2031:
The pattern will continue because the structural issue remains unaddressed: no one in the ecosystem measures readiness before deployment.
The Alternative: What 97.3% Success Looks Like
In 1998, the Department of National Defence didn’t ask: “What technology should we buy?”
They asked: “Why are we failing at 51% delivery accuracy, and what needs to change before we deploy anything new?”
The answer wasn’t technology. It was organizational readiness:
- Mapping behavioral patterns
- Understanding incentive structures
- Assessing absorptive capacity
- Building readiness before deployment
Result: 97.3% success.
That’s not a prediction. That’s documented, government-audited reality.
The methodology that produced that result—readiness-first, technology-second—is what the Hansen Method codifies. It’s what Gartner’s predictions consistently ignore. And it’s why the 80% failure rate persists while the predictions keep coming.
Conclusion: Predictions Aren’t Useless—They’re Incomplete
Gartner’s business model requires predictions. Organizations buy subscriptions to learn “what’s next.”
But “what’s next” has never been the constraint. Four technology eras. Exponential capability growth. Flat-to-declining success rates.
The Procurement Insights archives document what predictions don’t capture: the human, organizational, behavioral reality of transformation.
Predictions aren’t useless—they’re incomplete.
The missing variable isn’t “what will exist by 2031.” It’s who will be ready to absorb it—and that is measurable today.
Gartner measures technology maturity. The Hansen Method measures organizational readiness. One tells you what’s possible. The other tells you what’s achievable—for you, right now.
“Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
Maybe the problem isn’t the plan for what’s next. Maybe it’s the absence of a plan for what’s here—the organizational readiness that determines whether “next” becomes success or another statistic.
Now you know the answer.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and the Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. His research dates to 1998 with Canada’s Department of National Defence, where agent-based modeling achieved 97.3% delivery accuracy and 23% cost savings. The Procurement Insights archives (2007-2025) are available at procureinsights.com.
Related Reading:
The 18-Year Through-Line: From 2007 Warnings to 2025 Reality
The Pyramid is Crumbling: When Defenders Become Evidence
The Revenue Trap: Why Procurement Technology Keeps Failing
-30-
IBM just topped Stanford’s global transparency index — and it’s a meaningful win. But there’s a second kind of transparency the industry still isn’t measuring… and it’s the one that determines whether organizations actually succeed with AI.
Procurement Insights
The Prediction Industrial Complex: Gartner’s 2031 Forecast vs. 27 Years of Documented Reality
Posted on December 12, 2025
0
By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | December 12, 2025
Gartner’s Latest Predictions
This week, Gartner released “The Gartner 100+ Data, Analytics & AI Predictions Through 2031″—a sweeping set of forecasts about what technology will do over the next six years.
The highlights:
Their framing: “Disruptive change is accelerating, and data, analytics, and AI are at the core of transformation. Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
That last sentence is revealing. Let me repeat it:
“Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
Gartner has been selling “what’s next” for decades. If organizations are still struggling to plan after 40 years of Gartner predictions… maybe the problem isn’t a shortage of predictions.
The Measurement That’s Missing
Here’s what confuses me: Gartner creates the Hype Cycles and predictions that the market treats as authoritative. Their frameworks are considered accurate. Their analysts are quoted as experts. Their Magic Quadrants influence billions in purchasing decisions.
But what do Hype Cycles actually measure?
What do Hype Cycles not measure?
In other words: Gartner measures everything except the only metrics that actually matter to organizations.
A technology can be at the “Plateau of Productivity” on the Hype Cycle while 60-80% of organizations fail to implement it successfully. The Hype Cycle doesn’t capture that. It was never designed to.
So when Gartner says a technology is “mature” or “ready for mainstream adoption,” they’re making a statement about the technology’s capability—not about whether your organization can absorb it.
The Procurement Insights Counter-Archive (1998-2025)
While Gartner has been forecasting technology capabilities, I’ve been documenting organizational outcomes.
The archive begins not in 2007 when Procurement Insights launched, but in 1998—when the Canadian government funded my SR&ED research into agent-based relational acquisition modeling for the Department of National Defence.
The DND Results (1998-2001):
That methodology—which prioritized organizational readiness over technology capability—produced results that the technology-first approach has never matched at scale.
What the archives document across four technology eras:
Four eras. Technology capability increased exponentially. Across cases documented in the Procurement Insights archive, the observed success rate remains stubbornly low—and the pattern persists.
The Divergence: Promise vs. Reality
Here’s what the data shows when you map the technology promise trajectory against documented implementation reality:
[INSERT LINE GRAPH: “The Prediction Gap: 1998-2031”]
The graph tells the story:
The only data point that breaks the pattern: 1998 DND deployment—where readiness assessment preceded technology selection, and success reached 97.3%.
Note: Gartner “Predicts” are strategic planning assumptions (SPAs), not audited forecasts. This chart visualizes the recurring promise-vs.-adoption gap documented across the Procurement Insights archive.
Gartner’s Own Warnings Acknowledge the Gap
Here’s what makes this particularly revealing. Even as Gartner publishes optimistic predictions about what technology will do, they simultaneously warn of significant failure rates:
These aren’t my critiques. These are Gartner’s own cautions—published alongside their technology predictions.
So in the same breath, Gartner tells organizations:
The predictions create urgency. The warnings create consulting engagements. But neither addresses the core question: Is your organization ready to absorb this change?
This isn’t a criticism of Gartner’s integrity. It’s an observation about what their frameworks were designed to measure—and what they weren’t.
What the Predictions Never Include
Look at Gartner’s 2031 predictions again. What’s missing?
The predictions are all about what technology will do. None are about whether organizations can absorb what technology does.
This is the structural blind spot I’ve been documenting since 2007—and researching since 1998.
The 18-Year Archive: What It Actually Shows
The Procurement Insights archives (2007-2025) contain nearly 3,000 articles documenting a consistent pattern:
Theme 1: Process Archaeology Before Technology
From the first posts in 2007 through today: understanding behavioral patterns and organizational readiness must precede technology selection. Technology that outpaces organizational capacity creates failure, not transformation.
Theme 2: The Equation-Based vs. Agent-Based Divide
Organizations fail when they treat procurement as mathematical optimization rather than understanding human behavioral patterns. Gartner’s predictions are equation-based. Reality is agent-based.
Theme 3: The Persistent 75-85% Failure Pattern
Documented consistently: high failure rates due to technology-first approaches ignoring organizational behavioral readiness. This number hasn’t improved despite four generations of technology advancement.
Theme 4: The Vendor-Analyst-Consultant Revenue Chain
The industry’s failure rate persists because no one in the revenue chain gets paid to say “stop—you’re not ready.” Predictions drive urgency. Urgency drives deployments. Deployments drive failures. Failures drive remediation consulting.
Theme 5: Readiness as the Missing Variable
Every technology era promises transformation. Every era delivers the same failure rate. The missing variable isn’t better technology—it’s readiness assessment.
The Question Gartner Can’t Answer
Gartner’s post says: “Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
My question: If Gartner has been providing “what’s next” predictions for 40 years, why are organizations still struggling to plan?
The answer isn’t more predictions. It’s that predictions about technology capability don’t address organizational readiness.
You can predict that 60% of dashboards will be replaced by GenAI narratives by 2026. That prediction tells you nothing about whether your organization can absorb that change.
You can predict that CDAOs who aren’t “strategic collaborators” will lose their jobs. That prediction tells you nothing about how to build the organizational capacity for strategic collaboration.
Predictions describe futures. They don’t create readiness for futures.
What the Next Six Years Will Actually Look Like
Based on 27 years of documented patterns, here’s what the Procurement Insights archive suggests for 2025-2031:
The pattern will continue because the structural issue remains unaddressed: no one in the ecosystem measures readiness before deployment.
The Alternative: What 97.3% Success Looks Like
In 1998, the Department of National Defence didn’t ask: “What technology should we buy?”
They asked: “Why are we failing at 51% delivery accuracy, and what needs to change before we deploy anything new?”
The answer wasn’t technology. It was organizational readiness:
Result: 97.3% success.
That’s not a prediction. That’s documented, government-audited reality.
The methodology that produced that result—readiness-first, technology-second—is what the Hansen Method codifies. It’s what Gartner’s predictions consistently ignore. And it’s why the 80% failure rate persists while the predictions keep coming.
Conclusion: Predictions Aren’t Useless—They’re Incomplete
Gartner’s business model requires predictions. Organizations buy subscriptions to learn “what’s next.”
But “what’s next” has never been the constraint. Four technology eras. Exponential capability growth. Flat-to-declining success rates.
The Procurement Insights archives document what predictions don’t capture: the human, organizational, behavioral reality of transformation.
Predictions aren’t useless—they’re incomplete.
The missing variable isn’t “what will exist by 2031.” It’s who will be ready to absorb it—and that is measurable today.
Gartner measures technology maturity. The Hansen Method measures organizational readiness. One tells you what’s possible. The other tells you what’s achievable—for you, right now.
“Many organizations struggle to plan for what’s next.”
Maybe the problem isn’t the plan for what’s next. Maybe it’s the absence of a plan for what’s here—the organizational readiness that determines whether “next” becomes success or another statistic.
Now you know the answer.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and the Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. His research dates to 1998 with Canada’s Department of National Defence, where agent-based modeling achieved 97.3% delivery accuracy and 23% cost savings. The Procurement Insights archives (2007-2025) are available at procureinsights.com.
Related Reading:
The 18-Year Through-Line: From 2007 Warnings to 2025 Reality
The Pyramid is Crumbling: When Defenders Become Evidence
The Revenue Trap: Why Procurement Technology Keeps Failing
-30-
IBM just topped Stanford’s global transparency index — and it’s a meaningful win. But there’s a second kind of transparency the industry still isn’t measuring… and it’s the one that determines whether organizations actually succeed with AI.
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