Management expects CV growth to accelerate through 2026
Gartner reported Q4 2025 results ahead of expectations but guided to a sluggish 2026, with revenue growth of just 2% FX neutral and a margin step-down to 23.5%. Management emphasized a multi-year transformation program to improve insights engagement and retention, but explicitly assumes the selling environment will not improve. The company is divesting its digital markets business to focus on core research. Q4 CV grew 1% YoY, but ex-U.S. Federal grew 4%, showing the federal headwind is easing.
Buzzberg readManagement expects CV growth to accelerate through 2026Gartner reported Q4 2025 results ahead of expectations but guided to a sluggish 2026, with revenue growth of just 2% FX neutral and a margin step-down to 23.5%. Management emphasized a multi-year transformation program to improve insights engagement and retention, but explicitly assumes the selling environment will not improve. The company is divesting its digital markets business to focus on core research. Q4 CV grew 1% YoY, but ex-U.S. Federal grew 4%, showing the federal headwind is easing.Read full analysisCollapse analysis
Gartner reported Q4 2025 results ahead of expectations but guided to a sluggish 2026, with revenue growth of just 2% FX neutral and a margin step-down to 23.5%. Management emphasized a multi-year transformation program to improve insights engagement and retention, but explicitly assumes the selling environment will not improve. The company is divesting its digital markets business to focus on core research. Q4 CV grew 1% YoY, but ex-U.S. Federal grew 4%, showing the federal headwind is easing.
2026 revenue guide implies FX-neutral growth of just 2%, well below historical double-digit targets.
Management assumes the tough selling environment persists, with no economic improvement expected in 2026.
Margins guided down to 23.5% from 24.8% in 2025, as investments in transformation and merit increases outpace modest revenue growth.
Revenue$1.7526B
reported
EPS$3.94
reported
Gross margin64.6%
reported
Op margin19.07%
reported
What changed this quarter
01
Guidance
Management expects CV growth to accelerate through 2026
Guidance · revenue to $3.2275B
02
AI
AI is the highest demand topic for clients
Management highlighted AI as the highest demand topic, with over 6,000 AI-related documents, more than 200,000 in-depth client conversations on AI, and 500,000 AI-related questions answered through Ask Gartner in 2025. They are leveraging AI internally to speed up insight…
03
AI
Ask Gartner users show higher renewal rates
Management highlighted AI as the highest demand topic, with over 6,000 AI-related documents, more than 200,000 in-depth client conversations on AI, and 500,000 AI-related questions answered through Ask Gartner in 2025. They are leveraging AI internally to speed up insight…
04
Operational Transfor
Insight library grew ~50% and creation time cut by 75%
Management assumes the tough selling environment persists, with no economic improvement expected in 2026.
AI, capex & demand read
AI
Platform & monetization
Management highlighted AI as the highest demand topic, with over 6,000 AI-related documents, more than 200,000 in-depth client conversations on AI, and 500,000 AI-related questions answered through Ask Gartner in 2025. They are leveraging AI internally to speed up insight creation and improve sales training, but they do not see AI as a substitute for Gartner's services.
Demand
Bookings & conversion
Management explicitly assumes the difficult selling environment persists through 2026, with CV growth only gradually accelerating. Guide implies revenue growth of just 2% FX neutral, below prior recovery expectations.
Capex
Investment and capacity
Capex was $115 million in 2025, and the 2026 guidance implies a similar level of investment. Management emphasized investments in AI, customer experience, and analyst talent, but no specific capex guidance was provided.
Tone · Measured
Management acknowledged a challenging macro environment but emphasized ongoing transformation and expected CV acceleration, balancing cautious assumptions with confidence in long-term value.
Supply-chain alpha
A1
Gartner's neural-network topic model and 'Ask Gartner' AI are driving a step-change in client engagement, with users showing substantially higher renewal rates. This is an internal signal that enterprises are increasingly reliant on AI-hubbed knowledge access, not just AI compute.
Management plans to grow quota-bearing headcount modestly, with a focus on business developers (new logo sales), while keeping sellers flat. This reflects a strategy to hunt for new logos rather than farm existing accounts in a budget-constrained environment.
Gartner's neural-network topic model and 'Ask Gartner' AI are driving a step-change in client engagement, with users showing substantially higher renewal rates. This is an internal signal that enterprises are increasingly reliant on AI-hubbed knowledge access, not just AI compute. — Demonstrates that AI-augmented research and workflows are becoming a key driver of enterprise retention, validating the ecosystem play of vendors embedding AI into content and collaboration stacks.
… can easily access the insights that are most relevant to them when they need them the most. Ask Gartner leverages AI to quickly identify and summarize the right high value insights across our vast library. It leverages role, function, mission critical priorities, insight viewership histories, and more to make his responses even more relevant to each licensed user. We began rolling out Ask Gartner in August of last year. We completed the rollout in October. Licensed users who used Ask Gartner had substantially higher renewal rates than those who did not, even with the same levels of engagement. We'll continuously improve and innovate Ask Gartner's capabilities. Separately, we're identifying role-specific insights each week that are particularly valuable and broadly applicable. Our goal is to ensure clients have every opportunity to engage with these uniquely valuable insights. We're also changing how we deliver insights in terms of format and access to meet today's client preferences. Conferences are an important way clients engage with our insights. Destination conferences provide high value to clients. but not all our clients can attend our destination conferences. For these …
Management plans to grow quota-bearing headcount modestly, with a focus on business developers (new logo sales), while keeping sellers flat. This reflects a strategy to hunt for new logos rather than farm existing accounts in a budget-constrained environment. — Indicates that even top research/insights vendors are shifting go-to-market spend to net-new acquisition, implying demand for existing-account expansion is weak—negative signal for enterprise software sales execution broadly.
Hey, good morning, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. You've talked a lot about sort of expanding the breadth of your offerings, the velocity of the insights, and the ease of use improvements as well. Just wondering if you can maybe talk about if there's any changes to your sales strategy or go-to-market strategy that you're thinking about for this year, and then if you can also help us with how we should think about sort of the phasing of your quota-based headcount, quota-bearing headcount growth across GTS and GBS for 26. Thanks.
… programs. One of the things we've done to enhance that, which has actually worked better than we expected, actually, is use AI-based role-play tools so that you can put a salesperson in a situation with these AI tools where they are talking to a prospect or a client about things like what's the value What are the questions they might have? Do I get a discount? Why don't I get a discount? Whatever those questions might be, then our sales team actually get practice ahead of time. And we've always done role plays, but adding AI-based tools has allowed us to exponentially expand those kind of role plays. And the sales teams love these tools because it makes them so much more efficient. The second thing we're doing is there's content that, if you look at all the content we produce, we produce tons of it. What we've been doing is taking Each week, what is the content that would be most valuable for a salesperson in their role? Whether they're selling CHROs, it would be one set of content. If they're selling CIOs, a different set. If they're selling CFOs, a different set. So for that week, if they had to promote one piece of content, what would it be? And we do it every week. So now what we're doing is actually identifying that content, and we have a whole process to get it out to our sales force and explain why they need to know about that content, how they should talk about it with clients, et cetera. and equips them to actually be much more substantive with our clients and confident on the issues that that week are the most important, which is another piece we're doing. Another piece we're doing is expanding the role of business developers. And so we have very modest Salesforce expansion plan for 2026. One of the things that we found even last year, our business developer productivity has been actually quite strong over time. While we had a lot of challenges last year with existing clients, actually selling prospects, which are business developers too, was actually, they were very strong. And so because of our sales productivity strength there, that's the one place that we have added to our sales force going into 2026, which we think positions us well for both 26 and 27 to take time for people to get to full productivity. There's a lot of other changes, but they give you a flavor for, even though I didn't talk about it a lot, we're continuing to innovate.
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