“Emerging technologies offer the transformational potential for businesses, but CIOs and technology innovation leaders are challenged to scale digital capabilities while improving sustainability in the face of expanding resource constraints,” said Melissa Davis, VP analyst at Gartner.
“It is essential that organisations cut through the noise surrounding emerging technologies to accelerate change by leveraging innovations that drive competitive differentiation and efficiency.”
Melissa Davis
Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies has put 25 emerging technologies on the watchlist for their potential to enable the evolution and expansion of immersive experiences, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) automation and optimising technology delivery.
These technologies and trends have the potential to deliver a high degree of competitive advantage over the next two to 10 years (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Hype cycle for emerging technologies, 2022
Gary Olliffe, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, reminds us that all technologies on this Hype Cycle are at an early stage, but some are nascent and great uncertainty exists about how they will evolve.
“Such technologies present greater risks for deployment, but potentially greater benefits for early adopters who can assess and exploit them in line with their organisation’s ability to handle unproven technologies,” he added.
Themes of emerging technology trends
Evolving and expanding immersive experiences: The future of digital experience is immersive. A collection of emerging technologies supports such experiences through dynamic virtual representations, environments and ecosystems of customers and people, as well as new modes of user engagement.
With these technologies, individuals can control their own identities and data and experience virtual ecosystems that can be integrated with digital currencies. These technologies help reach customers in new ways to strengthen or open new revenue streams.
The technologies to watch that deliver evolving and expanding immersive experiences are metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), super apps and Web3, decentralised identity, digital humans, digital twin of the customer and internal talent marketplaces.
Accelerated AI automation: AI adoption is expanding as an integral part of products, services and solutions. This is accelerating the creation of specialised AI models that can be applied to automate model development, training, and deployment. AI automation refocuses the role of humans in AI development, resulting in more accurate predictions and decisions and faster time to expected benefits.
The technologies that are supporting accelerated AI automation are autonomic systems, causal AI, foundation models, generative design AI and machine learning code generation.
Optimised technologist delivery: Successful digital businesses are built, not bought. A set of emerging technologies focuses on the product, service, and solution builder communities, such as fusion teams, and the platforms they use.
These technologies provide feedback and insight that optimise and accelerate product, service and solution delivery and increase the sustainability of business operations.
The critical technologies that are optimising technologist delivery are augmented FinOps, cloud data ecosystems, cloud sustainability, computational storage, cybersecurity mesh architecture, data observability, dynamic risk governance, industry cloud platforms, minimum viable architecture, observability-driven development, OpenTelemetry and platform engineering.
