Gartner has named the keynote speakers for its 2026 IT Symposium/Xpo, the research firm’s flagship gathering for CIOs and senior technology leaders. The event runs October 19 through 22 in Orlando, Florida, marking one of several regional editions Gartner stages each year, with the Orlando run serving as the largest of the bunch.
IT Symposium/Xpo is Gartner’s biggest conference of the year by attendance, pulling in thousands of IT executives for sessions on AI strategy, cybersecurity budgets, cloud spending, and how technology investment priorities are shifting across large enterprises. The week is built around Gartner’s analyst bench rather than outside speakers alone. Attendees can book one-on-one meetings with individual analysts throughout the event, on top of the keynote stage, breakout tracks, and roundtable discussions that run in parallel across the convention center.
The expo floor runs alongside the analyst programming, with vendors across cloud infrastructure, security, data platforms, and enterprise software setting up booths to meet with the CIOs and IT buyers in attendance. Gartner also uses the week to publish updated versions of several of its Magic Quadrant reports, which tend to move stock prices and sales conversations for the vendors named in them.
Orlando has hosted the fall edition of the symposium for years, and this run leans further into AI governance and agentic systems than prior editions, on top of Gartner’s usual coverage of infrastructure modernization and IT leadership development. Security and AI spending discipline are expected to be recurring threads across the keynote track, given how much budget scrutiny enterprise AI projects have drawn over the past year.
For a domain built around conference coverage, IT Symposium/Xpo is one of the few events big enough to set the tone for enterprise technology purchasing conversations well into the following year.