Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025: Day 2 Highlights with Infor – Building What’s Next with AI

Day 2 of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025 in Orlando shifted the conversation from AI readiness to the realities of leading in an AI-driven economy. Gartner’s sessions explored how organizations can balance rapid innovation with governance and accountability, covering the Top Strategic Predictions for 2026 and Beyond, new trends in software engineering, executive AI governance playbooks and the evolution of misinformation.

At Infor, we see these discussions as confirmation of where modern enterprise is headed: toward a connected, intelligent ecosystem where every process, application, and decision is informed by trusted AI. With Infor CloudSuite, our ecosystem unites our market-leading cloud ERP and industry applications with our latest innovations of Infor Industry AI Agents and Velocity Suite powered by Infor Industry Cloud Platform, helping organizations innovate responsibly, automate intelligently, and govern confidently.

As Gartner emphasized throughout Day 2, success in the AI economy requires more than technology; it demands vision, transparency, and human oversight. Here’s how the key insights from Day 2 align with Infor’s approach to delivering measurable, trustworthy AI value.

Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2026 and Beyond

In the session Top Strategic Predictions for 2026 and Beyond, Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, Chief of Research and Gartner Fellow, shared the following key takeaways:

• Through 2026, atrophy of critical-thinking skills, due to GenAI use, will push 50% of the global organizations to require “AI-free” skills assessments. “Treating AI like a wizard could set us back 10 years.”
  
  • Infor’s perspective: At Infor, we believe AI should amplify—not replace—human judgment. Our Industry AI Solutions are designed to keep humans in the loop, providing explainable insights, contextual reasoning, and transparent outcomes that strengthen critical thinking across the organization.
• By 2027, 35% of countries will be locked into region-specific AI platforms using proprietary contextual data. “Employ model distillation as a tactic to reduce the impact of regional lock-in.”
  
  • Infor’s perspective: The Infor Industry Cloud Platform helps organizations avoid lock-in by supporting open, composable architectures and global interoperability. With flexible deployment options and regional data compliance built in, organizations can scale responsibly while maintaining freedom of choice.
• By 2028, organizations that leverage multiagent AI for 80% of customer-facing business processes will dominate. “Design processes for AI agents, not humans.”
  
  • Infor’s perspective: Infor Industry AI Agents are built precisely for this future, collaborating across industry-specific processes to optimize customer experiences and operational flow. Embedded in industry-specific workflows, these agents extend human capability while maintaining governance and context.
    
• By 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent intermediated, pushing over $15 trillion of B2B spend through AI agent exchanges. “Make products machine-readable to unlock new markets.”
  
  • Infor’s perspective: Through Infor Velocity Suite, organizations can automate and digitize their processes, making data, products, and services machine-readable and ready for agent-to-agent transactions. Manual tasks that used to take hours can be automatically completed in seconds with Infor Value+ solutions, from invoice processing and compliance checks to customer account creation.
    
• By the end of 2026, “death by AI” legal claims will exceed 1,000 due to insufficient AI risk guardrails. “Create contingency funds for damaging AI incidents.”
  
  • Infor’s perspective: Infor helps organizations strengthen their AI risk posture before incidents occur. The Infor Industry AI Transparency Note gives customers the clarity to understand how AI models are developed, trained, and governed, helping mitigate risk and uphold ethical, responsible AI use.

Top Strategic Trends in Software Engineering for 2025

In the session Top Strategic Trends in Software Engineering for 2025, Arun Batchu, VP Analyst at Gartner, explored how software engineering organizations can thrive “in times of intense economic and social volatility.” Batchu shared that “41% of leaders said that building AI capabilities into apps or establishing AI engineering were top organizational priorities. Improving software delivery processes and practices were also listed as top organizational priorities.”

He emphasized that, “To deliver on these objectives, you need to be strategic about where you place your bets — especially when your budget is flat.”

Gartner identified two broad areas of focus for 2025:

• “Accelerating innovation with AI-driven automation such as AI-native software engineering, building LLM-based applications and agents, and GenAI platform engineering.”
  
• “Implementing efficient, future-ready engineering practices such as maximizing talent density, green software engineering, and open GenAI models and ecosystems.”

These insights signal a clear shift: organizations must become software innovators themselves — rapidly building, extending, and deploying intelligent applications that can evolve alongside their business.

Infor’s perspective:

Infor empowers customers to become builders through the Infor Industry Cloud Platform providing the tools and technologies to easily extend and scale their operations with confidence and control.

• Build your own AI Agents with Infor GenAI Agent Factory to orchestrate and automate workflows using industry-leading foundation models through Amazon Bedrock
• Create low-code business applications with Infor Mongoose to extend CloudSuite functionality with custom workspaces and dashboards
• Train prescriptive and predictive AI models with Infor AI to unlock deeper insights and recommendations
• Innovate collaboratively through Infor’s Annual Community Hackathon where customers, partners, and developers co-create solutions using the entire Infor technology stack.

Together, these capabilities allow organizations to deliver on Gartner’s vision for “AI-native software engineering” and “open GenAI ecosystems”, empowering organizations not just to consume innovation, but to create it.

Looking Ahead

Gartner’s Day 2 insights reinforced that success in the AI economy depends on building with purpose—where innovation, governance, and agility move in lockstep.

With Infor CloudSuite, organizations can turn that vision into reality. From Industry AI Agents and Velocity Suite to the Industry Cloud Platform’s open architecture, Infor empowers organizations to design, automate, and scale AI responsibly—driving efficiency, transparency, and sustainable growth.

As Gartner’s sessions highlighted the power of innovation grounded in trust, Infor’s continued recognition of five consecutive years as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises reflects that same commitment to helping customers build intelligently and confidently.

See Infor’s Day 1 highlights here. 
Source: Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2025: Day 2 Highlights