Transcripts
Gartner, Inc.'s management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call — May 5, 2026
The most recent call: contract value re-accelerating outside U.S. federal, AI framed as a tailwind rather than a threat, and an EPS algorithm leaning hard on buybacks. · Open the full transcript →
Who Gartner sells to — and why those C-suite roles persist through any macro, the structural case for the subscription.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: Our clients are the senior-most executives and their teams who lead every major enterprise function. For example, Chief Information Officers and senior IT leaders, Chief Supply Chain Officers and heads of logistics, Chief Financial Officers and corporate controllers and more. These roles are enduring regardless of change in the world. The executives who lead these roles will always have priorities that are mission critical to the success of their enterprise, their functions and their personal careers.
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The proprietary-data moat behind the insights: half a million executive conversations and 27,000 vendor briefings a year.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: Gartner insights are derived from a vast pool of highly proprietary data. Every year, we hold more than 0.5 million two-way conversations with more than 80,000 executives across every major function and in every industry. We conduct more than 27,000 briefings with the executives from technology providers. We also leverage data from proprietary surveys, tools, models, benchmarks and more. This gives us a deep understanding of what executives care about most, what's working and what isn't.
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Why price pressure stays muted: Gartner starts at the top of the org chart, where price sensitivity is lowest.
Craig Safian, CFO, responding to Faiza Alwy (Deutsche Bank): And Faiza, it's important to remember who we're targeting and focusing on from a go-to-market and strategy perspective, which is really the top of the org chart in each of the functions we serve. We target the CIO, the CFO or the Chief Supply Chain Officer and their teams. We're starting at the top of the pyramid where there tends to be much less price sensitivity around those services. And again, if there is price sensitivity, there are offerings that we can provide to clients at different service levels.
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The DOGE/federal shock, dated and sized: felt from March 2025, leaving $114M of federal CV that now begins to lap.
Craig Safian, CFO, responding to Andrew Nicholas (William Blair): Andrew, on the U.S. Federal side, as we talked about through most of last year, the DOGE impacts, we really didn't start feeling them until March of last year. Jan and Feb were seminormal from a selling environment perspective. When the DOGE activities kicked in, that was really March and April and then forward from there. As we roll into Q2, we start to lap the significant challenges that we had there.
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How a low-single-digit CV grower still targets 12% EPS growth: margin expansion plus ~$2.4-2.5bn of annual buybacks.
Craig Safian, CFO, responding to Joshua Chan (UBS): Over a three-year period, our expectation is CV growth will reaccelerate, which will drive future revenue growth. We're committed to driving margin expansion over time as well. On top of that, we have significant capital to deploy for buybacks. […] Our intention is to continue share repurchases, which is one of the bigger drivers of that EPS CAGR in addition to revenue and margin expansion.
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Asked whether he'd distribute Gartner's data through third-party LLMs, Hall says proactive, human advisory doesn't fit that model.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO, responding to Toni Kaplan (Morgan Stanley): Toni, you're on the nail. Clients rely on us to proactively tell them what they're not seeing, help them see around corners and forecast how the world will evolve so they can be successful. That proactive advisory role doesn't fit well with simply feeding our proprietary data into an LLM that answers questions. There's also a big human component: executive partners, analysts, in-person conferences and peer interaction. Our published content is only a portion of what our analysts know — inquiries and analyst access unlock much more.
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Q4 & Full-Year 2025 Earnings Call — February 3, 2026 · annual
The annual strategy call: management reboots the research engine along four dimensions, divests digital markets, and defends the medium-term algorithm against 'disruption is in the air.' · Open the full transcript →
What made 2025 uniquely hard — DOGE, tariffs, funding cuts — and how those forces slowed every buying decision.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: 2025 was a unique year due to a range of external market forces. Department of government efficiency or dose-related initiatives affected our U.S. federal clients. Evolving trade policies created complexity for tariff-impacted enterprises. Funding changes affected our state and local government and education clients; tech companies that are not in or adjacent to AI experienced a shifting landscape. Additionally, there were country-specific factors in several geographies. These external market forces led to increased scrutiny, elevated deal approval authority, and extended buying cycles.
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The business model in three sentences: subscription, paid upfront, free cash flow well in excess of net income.
Craig Safian, CFO: The Insight segment is our largest, most important business. It's subscription-based with strong retention, recurring revenue, and excellent contribution margins. We get paid upfront, which allows us to generate strong free cash flow well in excess of net income.
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The strategic pivot: assume permanent disruption, sell the non-core digital-markets business, and concentrate on engagement.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO, responding to Joshua Chan (UBS): During the first half of last year, we came to the conclusion that we should assume that the world is going to be like this forever—that there's going to be a lot more disruption and chaos. We don't know what those things are going to be, but we need to be prepared for them. So to do that, we decided the best way to impact our business was to focus on our core BTI business. On top of that, and within that, the way to optimize that business is to get more client engagement. As I mentioned in my remarks, the more clients engage with us, the higher the retention is.
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The AI-threat metric: sellers log every 'AI instead of Gartner' mention — and management says Q4 saw even fewer.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO, responding to Toni Kaplan (Morgan Stanley): One specific concern we ask them to track is if a client mentions using AI as a substitute. In addition to that, we have a help desk; any salesperson can report that a client mentioned considering AI instead of Gartner. […] I should point out that we've faced a lot of challenges with clients in terms of their internal budgets, but one that we do not hear frequently is, 'They're thinking about using AI in some way as a substitute for Gartner.' If anything, Q4 was less of an issue or less confirmed than even before.
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The hardest question — 'disruption is in the air, why keep the medium-term targets?' — and Hall's answer.
Surinder Thind (Jefferies); Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: Gene, could you maybe talk about your willingness to kind of maintain the medium-term guidance here? It seems like we've had a number of challenging years where there's always something that disrupts your ability to hit that medium-term guidance. Given the pace of change, what gives you confidence that you can achieve medium-term guidance? […] Because of that, we needed to significantly increase the value we provide clients. So we have a program in place to do it. I mentioned earlier in the call that early indicators are positive. It will take time because, again, clients need to utilize our insights, then come up for renewal, which takes time.
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Q2 2025 Earnings Call — August 5, 2025
The shock call: DOGE guts federal renewals to ~47% dollar retention, tariffs push buying decisions up the org chart, and the AI-cannibalization question gets its bluntest answer. · Open the full transcript →
How Gartner reads a downturn: it tracks the reason for every lost renewal and new-business loss — Q2's biggest was federal.
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: We also experienced some headwinds during Q2. Measures of CEO confidence fell to recessionary levels, among the fastest drops ever recorded. And in a Gartner survey, 78% of CEOs indicated they're implementing cost-cutting measures to safeguard performance. We have a high degree of confidence in what caused these headwinds because we track the reason for every loss for both renewals and potential new business. The largest headwind in Q2 was with the U.S. federal government.
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The DOGE cliff, sized: barely half the federal dollars renewing, ~$200M of CV still exposed at mid-year.
Craig Safian, CFO: Nearly all of our U.S. federal contracts will come up for renewal during 2025, with over 60% having transacted in the first half of the year. Dollar retention year-to-date was around 47%.
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The bridge back to double digits, quantified: ~200bp from lapping federal, ~100bp tariff normalization, ~100bp tech vendors.
Craig Safian, CFO: There are four primary categories, which will drive the return to double-digit growth. First, most of our U.S. federal contracts will have come up for renewal this year. Removing the DOGE-related headwinds with no assumption for net growth next year will add back around 200 basis points of CV growth in 2026. Second, as companies and tariff-affected industries get more clarity around trade policies, we expect them to get back to normal course planning and spending. This should add at least 100 basis points to growth. Third, tech vendor remains on a path back to double digits.
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The tariff playbook: routine license decisions get escalated to the CFO/CEO — the same friction Gartner saw in 2009 and 2021.
Gartner management, responding to Toni Kaplan (Morgan Stanley): This year, particularly in Q2, we observed that in industries affected by tariffs, purchase decisions have been escalated. Typically, a Chief HR Officer or a Chief Information Officer has the authority to decide on purchasing additional licenses from Gartner. However, in Q2, we noticed that these decisions were being elevated to the CFO or even the CEO. Clients indicated that this was due to concerns about tariffs impacting their profitability, preventing them from passing on all costs to their clients. As a result, they are implementing significant cost-cutting measures, which is why small purchases are being escalated to higher levels. This pattern is consistent with behavior observed during previous recessions. We saw similar behavior during the pandemic in 2021 and the Great Recession in 2009.
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The AI-cannibalization question, answered bluntly: clients citing a public LLM instead of Gartner are 'essentially unmeasurable.'
Jason Haas (Wells Fargo); Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO: Are you able to give us any sense of what percentage of folks are citing usage of like a publicly available large language model and therefore, not consuming the Gartner subscription? Is that coming up at all? What percentage is that? […] Yes, that's one of the options, and it's not significant. It's essentially unmeasurable.
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Q4 & Full-Year 2024 Earnings Call — February 4, 2025 · annual
The full-year 2024 call that best explains the model — upfront cash, 100%+ wallet retention, disciplined pricing — and diagnoses the tech-vendor VC bubble that had whipsawed growth. · Open the full transcript →
How land-and-expand shows up: wallet retention above 100% means existing clients grow spend even before new logos.
Craig Safian, CFO: Wallet retention for GTS was 102% for the quarter, reflecting net growth even before the addition of new clients. […] While retention for GBS was 106% for the quarter, reflecting strong net growth with our existing clients, GBS new business was up 15% compared to last year.
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The federal exposure before the storm: ~$270M (5% of CV), nearly all one-year contracts — the base DOGE would hit in 2025.
Craig Safian, CFO: Our contracts are spread widely across agencies and departments. Around 85% of U.S. Federal CV is in GTS. Almost all the U.S. federal contracts are for 1 year with renewal spread across the year.
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The medium-term algorithm: 12-16% CV growth drives double-digit revenue, modest margin gains, and FCF at least as fast as EBITDA.
Craig Safian, CFO: With 12% to 16% Research CV growth, we will deliver double-digit revenue growth. With gross margin expansion, sales costs growing about in line with CV growth and G&A leverage, we will expand EBITDA margins modestly over time. We can grow free cash flow at least as fast as EBITDA because of our modest CapEx needs and the benefits of our clients paying us upfront.
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The tech-vendor whipsaw, diagnosed: a 3-4x VC funding bubble inflated then deflated demand — 'I don't anticipate it happening again.'
Gene Hall, Chairman & CEO, responding to Surinder Thind (Jefferies): The last few years have been quite remarkable for the tech sector. Venture capital funding surged significantly during this time, increasing by about three to four times. I believe there was an exceptionally large bubble in venture capital spending, which in turn created a bubble among tech companies. I don't recall such a situation occurring before, and I don't anticipate it happening again. While anything is possible, this was certainly unusual. In the two decades prior, we experienced fluctuations, but nothing on this scale.
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Pricing philosophy: a sub-4% annual increase set by product, geography and — above all — local wage inflation.
Craig Safian, CFO, responding to Jeff Silber (BMO Capital Markets): Jeff, so the price increase for the most part goes into effect, as you said, on November 1. On average, it was a little bit below 4%. But we don't paint it with a broad paint brush. We actually look at it specifically by product and by geography. And so in markets that are more inflationary, we will be more aggressive on pricing. And again, one of the key inputs that we look at is wage inflation in the given markets as well because as we've talked about, philosophically, we want to make sure that our pricing at least offsets what our expectation is from a wage inflation perspective, so it is not a broad paint brush, we're actually very laser-focused on making sure that we're taking the pricing up the right amount, in the right places, in the right currencies.
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More calls
Q3 2025 Earnings Call — November 4, 2025 · 12 pages · The quarter before the transformation reveal: engagement and conference NPS presented as leading indicators of future retention, with early signs tariff-hit industries were stabilizing. · Open →
Q1 2025 Earnings Call — May 6, 2025 · 12 pages · Where the federal/DOGE shock first broke into results — the initial read on renewal timing, ~50% dollar retention and roughly $225M of exposed federal CV. · Open →
Q3 2024 Earnings Call — November 5, 2024 · 10 pages · The 'contract value turned the corner' quarter — a clear walk-through of the CV-to-revenue flywheel and why new sales hires take ~3 years to reach full productivity. · Open →
Q1 2024 Earnings Call — April 30, 2024 · 12 pages · The quarter management called the tech-vendor bottom and explained the enterprise-leader vs. tech-vendor split — and why AI was substituting for, not adding to, research demand. · Open →
Q4 & Full-Year 2023 Earnings Call — February 6, 2024 · annual · 15 pages · The full-year 2023 call that laid out the subscription model — 75%+ of revenue, 70%+ multiyear contracts — and the first full in-person conference year, as the GenAI-threat debate peaked. · Open →
Q3 2023 Earnings Call — November 3, 2023 · 12 pages · After the 2022 over-hiring, the call on sales-force tenure as the coiled spring for productivity, plus management's framing of 'low-20s' structural EBITDA margins. · Open →
Q2 2023 Earnings Call — August 1, 2023 · 11 pages · The non-subscription lead-gen cliff explained — why a $70M guidance cut sat almost entirely outside the durable subscription base, and how wallet retention holds ex-tech-vendor. · Open →