Eighty percent of CEOs expect AI to force a high to medium degree of change to their operational capabilities, according to the Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey published April 23. The survey of 469 CEOs and senior executives, conducted over three quarters ending Q4 2025, frames the shift as a move from “digital business” to “autonomous business,” where self-learning agents and machine customers make decisions independently.
The numbers trace a steep ramp. Currently, 54% of CEOs say their automation is limited to specific tasks. By 2028, only 13% expect to remain at that level. Twenty-seven percent expect their organizations to operate primarily without human intervention, per Digit.fyi’s coverage of the survey.
Transactional Revenue Under Pressure
The survey’s most pointed finding concerns revenue models. Twenty-eight percent of CEOs said transactional revenue is at highest risk from AI, because agents can bypass intermediaries and conduct real-time pricing negotiations. “As AI agents automate purchasing, pricing, and negotiation, they remove the extra steps and inefficiencies that transaction fees were designed to cover,” David Furlonger, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said in the press release. “This is forcing CEOs to rethink profit models and pivot toward recurring, outcome-based revenue models.”
That finding has direct implications for SaaS companies, marketplaces, and financial intermediaries whose pricing depends on being in the transaction path. If agents route around intermediaries, the fee-extraction model collapses.
Machine Customers Are Coming
Only 17% of CEOs expect significant changes to their human customer base from AI. The bigger shift is in non-human buyers. Gartner predicts that through 2026, the number of large companies with a dedicated business unit or sales channel to access machine customer markets will double versus 2024, according to DQ Channels.
“To prepare for this inevitable future, CEOs and CIOs must lead their organisations to rebuild their operational foundations and reengineer their people, assets, and financial structures,” Don Scheibenreif, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said in the release.
The Gap Between Intent and Execution
The 80% headline signals intent, not execution. Previous Gartner surveys on digital transformation showed similar C-suite enthusiasm followed by implementation challenges around data quality, legacy systems, and organizational resistance. The agent-specific barriers are newer: governance frameworks for autonomous decision-making barely exist at most companies, security tooling for agent-to-agent interactions is still emerging, and the talent pool for building production agent systems is thin.
What differentiates this cycle from prior automation waves is the timeline compression. CEOs are not planning for a decade-long transition. The survey’s 2028 target for 27% operating without human intervention is less than two years away. Whether that timeline reflects realistic planning or aspirational survey responses will become clear as companies report actual agent deployments against these stated goals.