Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo: AI risk outpaces value, only 58% see gains

Gartner Japan's keynote frames the CIO agenda as a race between two curves: value from AI and risk from AI. Its Q2 2026 survey of more than 1,000 unit leaders suggests the risk curve is currently steeper for many organizations, since respondents said AI risk is growing faster than AI value in their own organization — even as 58% reported at least some positive value. That combination points to partial success that has not yet been spread across the enterprise, a gap Gartner describes as organizations struggling to scale value company-wide.

The survey also puts a number on the governance side of the equation: only 25% of CIOs align technology and business risk. Senior director analyst Neha Kumar's comment that the new CIO task is to align value with risk — and safety with governance — sits against that 25% figure, suggesting alignment is the exception rather than the rule. Gartner's prescription leans on people rather than tooling alone: it says humans always determine AI success, and identifies advanced AI users as the emerging carriers of value creation.

That is where Gartner's “value and risk flywheel” comes in. To expand the value side, Gartner argues the next strong value proposition lies in supporting advanced AI users so that value compounds. The framing does not claim risk can be eliminated; it sets the CIO's job as accumulating value faster than risk rises, with the flywheel used to visualize how compounding value and compounding risk relate.