Published on the 19/08/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

A hero’s weapon for leaders…

Sam Higgins is calling on local IT leaders to harness the power of the gods – and three graces from ancient Greek mythology – along with high performance IT to create a resilient tech strategy in an AI, and agentic, world.

In a session calling heavily on Greek mythology, Higgins, who is a VP, principal analyst with Forrester, outlined how high performance IT – in Forrester’s terms, the pursuit of continuously improving business results through technology – can enable IT teams and businesses to not only survive the storm, but tame it.

“HPIT in the age of AI begins with intentional design, but also intentional enquiry.”

“It’s not about accepting our fate or reacting to the chaos, uncertainty and mayhem, but shaping a path through it,” he says.

“In our modern world, the hero’s power is high performance IT and the graces needed are beauty, charm and abundance, but expressed as traits that we describe as alignment, trust and adaptivity.”

On the ‘grace’ of alignment, Higgins says it requires will require IT to ask the right questions not only of the business, but of the architecture, data and operating models.

“HPIT in the age of AI begins with intentional design, but also intentional enquiry.”

Forrester’s IT value co-creation framework starts with working with business leaders on their needs and the way new and emerging technologies can help them reimagine their current and future business capabilities in the age of AI.

“Critically, value co-creation means asking questions not once but in an iterative loop of feedback and recalibration,” he says.

When chaos reigns, creativity, dynamism and an ability to explore new ideas matter more than a singular vision of the future, making static strategies insufficient, he says.

Forrester research shows HPIT teams report they are in constant alignment with business counterparts, 96 percent of the time, with 60 percent saying they use dynamic business to IT roadmaps. That’s compared with just 40 percent of their ‘foundational performance’ counterparts.

Moving on to the second grace – charm – which Higgins says is about resonance and making ideas, strategies and solutions ‘irresistibly compelling’ to stakeholders, he says high performing IT teams use four IT styles to help them build consensus across IT and the business:

– Enabling to stabilise, operate and protect the business;

– Cocreation for delivery of new products for faster growth or, in the case of the public sector, for new opportunities to do service delivery;

– Amplifying to optimise the business at scale taking existing business or technologies and scaling up; and

– Transforming, where appropriate, to power breakthrough tech-led change.

“A charmed IT strategy communicates how the vision will become reality, it simplifies the complex because when an IT strategy feels intuitive and elegant it is easier to adopt, fund and scale in a way stakeholders can justify and support.”

In thinking about how to enable the business, Higgins says that involves asking how to ensure the technology is stable, secure and resilient enough to protect and sustain core operations. In co-creating it’s about partnering internally, but also externally to rapidly ideate and deliver new offerings that drive growth or opportunities, while in amplifying it’s asking how to scale tech use to continuously optimise performance. Asking the business how emerging technologies can be leveraged to create breakthrough innovations and reinvent the business rounds out the investment styles.

Harnessing that same model of enabling, cocreating, amplifying and transforming, Higgins outlined how predictive AI and genAI play important roles in delivering HPIT – from helping IT execute efficiently and effectively to helping find and ideate opportunities for new products and opening doors to building new managed services and ways of delivery not yet imagined.

But it’s in the area of amplification that Forrester believes AI’s biggest impact lies, with machine learning, insights, automation and personalisation applied to existing businesses, customers and opportunities to optimise outcomes at scale.

And the final grace?

That would be abundance and Higgins argues that we are on our way to an ‘unlimited’ future – with unlimited resource, knowledge and productivity – but that future, dominated by agentic AI means we need an abundance mindset and a HPIT strategy powered by alignment, adaptivity and trust.

When it comes to AI, HPIT teams are more likely to unlock this abundance according to Forrester research which shows HPIT teams are 2.75x more likely to be using genAI in production applications, and have a higher percentage of deployment across all use cases – and have 10 percent more control over their financial destiny with increased overall budgets in the past 12 months and more budget expected in the coming 12 months.

“The big question facing us all today is if greater abundance is what we can expect from adopting HPIT and applying AI, what does the arrival of agentic AI mean to the future of our HPIT efforts?”

Beyond applying the three graces and the principles of HPIT, businesses need to understand and prepare for four things when it comes to moving from genAI efforts to agentic AI.

Those four things?

Agentic will

– Restructure operating and business models with four potential impacts from augmentation, automation, enrichment and reinvention;

– Require the adoption of new patterns for technology deployment, with agentic AI adoption meaning new technical tradeoffs;

– Require the creation of new knowledge architectures;

– Demand a human-centred transformation.

Higgins says organisations will need to harness their knowledge capacity to drive an AI-powered future, with opportunities to harvest tacit knowledge – the information employees have in their head and ‘invisible’ methodologies not documents.

“AI presents us with the opportunities to make some of these things explicit.”

He notes Siemens use of chatbots to interview and extract expert knowledge from senior engineers to make the knowledge available to more junior engineers.

“Doing this will require us to build knowledge loops that grow this knowledge capacity, whether common or specialised, tacit or captured, over time.”

Keeping a focus on human-centred transformation will also be key, he says. Research shows a gap between management’s beliefs about how much AI training staff are receiving, versus the actual training staff say they’re getting.

“It is very important that we make sure that as leaders we recognise that for a lot of employees there is still a large degree of uncertainty when it comes to AI and particularly agentic AI.

“Adopting these systems, unlocking this abundance through AI, achieving and continuing to achieve high performance IT requires that we are really careful about this human centred transformation,” he says.

“We can’t even begin to predict what opportunities agentic AI might offer us, but one thing is for certain: We can’t rely on thoughts and prayers or the mercies of the gods to get us through this period. We need to rely on our graces and the principles of high performance IT through alignment, trust and adaptivity to get us there.”