Top 10 Intriguing Technology Trends for 2019
The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.
"The future will be characterized by smart devices delivering increasingly insightful digital services everywhere. We call this the intelligent digital mesh," said David Cearley, Gartner Distinguished Vice President.
- Intelligent: How AI is in virtually every existing technology, and creating entirely new categories.
- Digital: Blending the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive world.
- Mesh: Exploiting connections between expanding sets of people, businesses, devices, content and services.
"Trends under each of these three themes are a key ingredient in driving a continuous innovation process as part of the continuous next strategy," Cearley said.
Here's a list of the Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology trends that will impact and transform industries through 2023.
Trend No. 1: Autonomous things
Whether it is cars, robots or agriculture, autonomous things use AI to perform tasks traditionally done by humans. Autonomous things exist across five types:
- Robotics
- Vehicles
- Drones
- Appliances
- Agents
Those five types occupy four environments: Sea, land, air and digital. They all operate with varying degrees of capability, coordination and intelligence.
Virtually every application, service and IoT object will incorporate some form of AI to automate or augment processes or human actions. Collaborative autonomous things such as drone swarms will increasingly drive the future of AI systems.
Trend No. 2: Augmented analytics
Data scientists now have increasing amounts of data to prepare, analyze and group and from which to draw conclusions. Given the amount of data, exploring all possibilities becomes impossible. This means businesses can miss key insights from hypotheses the data scientists don't have the capacity to explore.
Augmented analytics represents a third major wave for data and analytics capabilities as data scientists use automated algorithms to explore more hypotheses.
Ordinary people or citizen data scientists will use AI powered augmented analytics tools and businesses will look to them as a way to enable and scale data science capabilities.
Gartner predicts by 2020, the number of citizen data scientists will grow five times faster than professional data scientists and more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated, resulting in increased productivity and broader use by citizen data scientists.
Trend No. 3: AI-driven development
AI-driven development looks at tools, technologies and best practices for embedding AI into applications and using AI to create AI-powered tools for the development process. With these tools the professional developer can infuse AI powered capabilities and models into an application without involvement of a professional data scientist.
AI-enabled tools are evolving from assisting and automating functions related to application development (AD) to being enhanced with business domain expertise and automating activities higher on the AD process stack (from general development to business solution design).
The market will shift from a focus on data scientists partnered with developers to developers operating independently using predefined models delivered as a service. These trends are also leading to more mainstream usage of virtual software developers and nonprofessional "citizen application developers."
Trend No. 4: Digital twins
A digital twin is a digital representation that mirrors a real-life object, process or system. Digital twins can also be linked to create twins of larger systems, such as a power plant or city. The idea of a digital twin is not new. It goes back to computer-aided design representations of things or online profiles of customers.
The focus today is on digital twins in the IoT, which could improve enterprise decision making by providing information on maintenance and reliability, insight into how a product could perform more effectively, data about new products and increased efficiency. Digital twins of an organization are emerging to create models of organizational process to enable real time monitoring and drive improved process efficiencies.
Trend No. 5: Empowered edge
Edge computing is a topology where information processing and content collection and delivery are placed closer to the sources of the information, with the idea that keeping traffic local will reduce latency.
Currently, much of the focus of this technology is a result of the need for IoT systems to deliver disconnected or distributed capabilities into the embedded IoT world. This type of topology will address challenges ranging from high WAN costs and unacceptable levels of latency. Further, it will enable the specifics of digital business and IT solutions.
Through 2028, Gartner expects a steady increase in the embedding of sensor, storage, compute and advanced AI capabilities in edge devices. In general, intelligence will move toward the edge in a variety of endpoint devices, from industrial devices to screens to smartphones to automobile power generators.
Trend No. 6: Immersive technologies
Through 2028, conversational platforms, which change how users interact with the world, and technologies such as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR), which change how users perceive the world, will lead to a new immersive experience. Next generation of VR will be able to sense shapes and track a user's position and MR will enable people to view and interact with their world.
By 2022, 70% of enterprises will be experimenting with immersive technologies for consumer and enterprise use, and 25% will have deployed to production.
The future of conversational platforms, which range from virtual personal assistants to chatbots, will incorporate expanded sensory channels that will allow the platform to detect emotions based on facial expressions, and they will become more conversational in interactions.
Eventually, the technology and thinking will shift to a point where the experience will connect people with hundreds of edge devices ranging from computers to cars.
Trend No. 7: Blockchain
Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger, an expanding chronologically ordered list of cryptographically signed, irrevocable transactional records shared by all participants in a network. Blockchain allows companies to trace a transaction and work with untrusted parties without the need for a centralized party (i.e., a bank). This greatly reduces business friction and has applications that began in finance, but have expanded to government, healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and others.
Blockchain could potentially lower costs, reduce transaction settlement times and improve cash flow. The technology has also given way to a host of blockchain-inspired solutions that utilize some of the benefits and parts of blockchain.
Blockchain will create $3.1T in business value by 2030.
Trend No. 8: Smart spaces
A smart space is a physical or digital environment in which humans and technology-enabled systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated and intelligent ecosystems. As technology becomes a more integrated part of daily life, smart spaces will enter a period of accelerated delivery. Further, other trends such as AI-driven technology, edge computing, blockchain and digital twins are driving toward this trend as individual solutions become smart spaces.
Smart spaces are evolving alone five key dimensions: Openness, connectedness, coordination, intelligence and scope. Essentially, smart spaces are developing as individual technologies emerge from silos to work together to create a collaborative and interaction environment. The most extensive example of smart spaces is smart cities, where areas that combine business, residential and industrial communities are being designed using intelligent urban ecosystem frameworks, with all sectors linking to social and community collaboration.
Trend No. 9: Digital ethics and privacy
Consumers have a growing awareness of the value of their personal information, and they are increasingly concerned with how it's being used by public and private entities. Enterprises that don't pay attention are at risk of consumer backlash.
Conversations regarding privacy must be grounded in ethics and trust. The conversation should move from "Are we compliant?" toward "Are we doing the right thing?"
Governments are increasingly planning or passing regulations with which companies must be compliant, and consumers are carefully guarding or removing information about themselves. Companies must gain and maintain trust with the customer to succeed, and they must also follow internal values to ensure customers view them as trustworthy.
Trend No. 10: Quantum computing
Quantum computing is a type of nonclassical computing that is based on the quantum state of subatomic particles that represent information as elements denoted as quantum bits or "qubits."
Quantum computers are an exponentially scalable and highly parallel computing model. A way to imagine the difference between traditional and quantum computers is to imagine a giant library of books.
While a classic computer would read every book in a library in a linear fashion, a quantum computer would read all the books simultaneously. Quantum computers are able to theoretically work on millions of computations at once. Quantum computing in the form of a commercially available, affordable and reliable service would transform some industries.
Real-world applications range from personalized medicine to optimization of pattern recognition. This technology is still in an emerging state. Aside from a select group of businesses where specific quantum algorithms would provide a major advantage, most enterprises could remain in exploration phase through 2022 and begin exploiting the technology later.
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