According to Gartner the following top 10 technology trends have the capacity to create substantial disruption and opportunities within the next five to ten years.
“Rather than building a technology stack and then exploring the potential applications, organizations must consider the business and human contexts first.” says David W. Cearley, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner.
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 are organized into two categories: People-Centric and Smart Spaces. Both focusing on how technologies will affect people and their natural environment.
Automation is already part of the business world and enterprises are automating rule-based tasks, connecting legacy systems and managing long-running processes. The “hyper” automation, supported by machine learning and AI, should be able to tackle tasks requiring thinking, designing and evaluating. All this relates to the people-centric approach by engaging the entire workforce and more importantly – fully integrated workforce to capture the full value of hyperautomation.
“Multiexperience moves across many human senses, which creates a richer, more immersive experience”. We see many examples of companies investing in different platforms supporting mobile, web, wearables and advanced computer sensors. Furthermore, the development of augmented reality and virtual reality will make our experiences “multisensory and multi touchpoint”.
According to Gartner, democratization is providing people an easy access to automated expertise beyond their own capabilities, experience or knowledge. That access focuses on four key areas:
Gartner predicts that “by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development and citizen development initiatives”. In addition, many development and testing functions will be automated. All this could be covering the growing data scientists and experts’ talent gap from the last couple of years.
Human augmentation aims to enhance human abilities through science and technology. Historically this has been achieved by consuming chemicals, installing implants and through wearables. With the evolving computer technologies, we are entering a new phase of the Human augmentation.
Gartner separates the augmentation into:
Augmentation technology should not be focused only on the well-being and quality of life of an individual, but also have a positive effect on the community and society.
More and more often, as a part of this new technological environment, we see examples of challenges related to data gathering, leakage and data privacy. Additionally, machine learning and AI are increasingly used to take decisions instead of humans, leading to an evolving trust crisis.
Ethics, Integrity, Openness, Accountability, Competence and consistency are the focus points around which government mechanisms are being built. First legislation rules for organizations were laid down in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) driving acceptance not just in Europe, but also around the Globe.
Empowered edge is about reducing latency, observing the increased volumes of technology on the Internet of things (IoT) and collection; processing & delivery of the information placed closer to the sources and the end users.
According to Gartner: “Distributed cloud refers to the distribution of public cloud services to locations outside the cloud provider’s physical data centers, but which are still controlled by the provider". That hybrid cloud mix of local and public cloud services is still quite difficult to implement in a cost-efficient manner. Being in its development stage providers offer only a small fraction of services in a distributed manner. However future offerings with higher variety of such services might be on the rise.
Autonomous things are technologies, like robots, ships, cars, drones, that use AI to perform tasks. Currently they operate in controlled environments like warehouses evolution plans are for them to evolve and include open public spaces moving from stand-alone devices to collaborative swarms.
Blockchain is a buzzword for quite a while now, but the scalability and practicality has been enterprises’ biggest issue so far. Gartner’s expectation is for the true blockchain, or “blockchain complete”, to have the potential to transform the environment with the integration of AI and IoT including a new type of participants – machines.
“Blockchain, which is already appearing in experimental and small-scope projects, will be fully scalable by 2023.”
Adding constantly devices and connected services via IoT the potential points for cyber-attack are increasing in direct proportion. AI Security will be solving problems related to protection of training data and ML models. On top of this also understand patterns and uncover attacks to successfully defend us.
Gartner warns that: “Through 2022, 30% of all AI cyberattacks will leverage training-data poisoning, AI model theft or adversarial samples to attack AI-powered systems.”
A combination of all these trends will give the best results for companies. Therefore IT managers should take a decision which out of these top ten to be prioritized and which ones would have the biggest impact on the innovations and strategies implemented.
You can get a free copy of the Gartner’s report here.