Gartner's Grift Is About To Unravel

I didn’t plan to write this post. I was going to blog about Agent Experience, the new concept coined by my former boss, Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify (I think we are on great terms so I can write this haha). I opened up netlify.com to link it and took a huge doubletake.

See anything unusual?

Of course you don’t, you don’t watch Netlify like it’s your second biggest shareholding. Here, let me take you back a whole ass 30 days to the start of 2025:

What’s different today?

No more Gartner banner. No more Composable Web Platform. Composable Architecture.

Hmm. Weird. I remember being told Composable was the future. Let’s look over at Contentful, that other big presumptive winner of the Jamstack/Composable era.

Oh?

OH.

How Gartner Grift Works

The basic business model of Gartner is:

• make up term as The Future

• put a lot of marketing firepower behind it

• make people pay to list on the magic quadrants

This works only as long as CTOs, the dream ICPs of everyone trying to sell into the enterprise, put any credibility into the magic quadrants. Five years ago some “Distinguished VP Analyst” (they are all Distinguished, wow) at Gartner decided Composable was the future:

and so the all the B2B SaaS/IaaS startups with no independent category creation traction suddenly became Composable:

In order to capture the SEO keyword and become Leaders in that Quadrant. This of course feeds on itself - if your major competitor puts Composable all over their landing page, you are going to feel pressure to have it. It’s like that parable about 37 different brands of cereal and putting out a new cereal that is “asbestos-free” on it. Of course the other cereals are asbestos free, but you’re going to wonder if they aren’t.

Accelerating Misses

I am no stranger to category creation and when done right I think it can be a very good harmonizing force for an industry (harmony being the best counter to entropy, which no one wants). But for a Gartner category to be adopted en masse in 2022 and be abandoned by 2024 is a very alarming miss — and it is not the only one.

More recently Databricks has, via Berkeley, tried to make “Compound AI Systems” a thing:

and though it is early days, I have already seen a very short wave of startups speedrun the cycle of wholesale adopting and then wholesale abandoning it. Gartner of course has its own term for it — Composite AI — and as far as I can tell it is going to flop — no real/serious AI player has even heard of it. In an age where we have like counts and subscriber counts and view counts for every itemized idea, the Gartner credibility machine no longer transfers and the idea needs to stand on its own merits.

Of course, Gartner often gives this treatment to ideas it didn’t come up with — the first time it wrote about AI Engineering, having missed its entire first year, it placed it at the peak of its famous hype cycle, despite multiple foundation model companies getting $100m seed rounds with no model and no product.

The most cited authorities in AI are not Gartner. The best claim to “new Gartner” now is Artificial Analysis (which I first called out a year ago and Gartner will probably acknowledge 5 years from now), which backs their analysis with live data because their founders and analysts are themselves engineers, not BA History majors given “Distinguished VP Analyst” titles. When the DeepSeek model dropped last month, Gartner had nothing to say, whereas Artificial Analysis was first out with comprehensive production tests and costing and the data/charts to back it up:

Boomer C-Suites who fancy themselves Enterprise Tech executives and are happy to throw humans at any problem were happy buying off the Gartner catalog and then hitting the golf course. Today, millennial CEOs and CTOs get their analysis and news sources from X, /r/LocalLlama, the All In Podcast, Semianalysis Substacks, any number of YouTubes and Podcasts. Meanwhile, Gartner’s home page is just an incessant amount of increasingly irrelevant Gartner Says:

Gideon Gartner started Gartner Inc in 1979 and it once provided an incredible important service when trusted C-suite buyer information was scarce and Deep Research wasn’t available for $200/month. Its greatest hits were the Magic Quadrant in 1994 and Hype Cycle in 1995. 30 years later, these simple, conveniently subjective and pay to play mental frameworks are showing their age. My college classmates and peers are now the next generation of leaders at {the big companies, VCs, and startups that you know} and none of them put any stock by Gartner.

What happens when you can no longer manufacture credibility for the credulous?