Gartner highlighted in a new report the top ten strategic technology trends that will impact most organisations in 2018.
According to Gartner, a strategic technology has a substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use over the next five years.
David Cearly, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said: “Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2018 tie into the Intelligent Digital Mesh. The intelligent digital mesh is a foundation for future digital business and ecosystems.”
The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2018 are:
1. AI Foundation
Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously will be a major battleground for technology vendors through at least 2020.
The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.
2. Intelligent Apps and Analytics
Over the next few years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI.
Some of these apps will be obvious intelligent apps that could not exist without AI and machine learning. Others will be unobtrusive users of AI that provide intelligence behind the scenes.
3. Intelligent Things
Intelligent things are physical things that go beyond the execution of rigid programming models to exploit AI to deliver advanced behaviours and interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people.
AI is driving advances for new intelligent things (such as autonomous vehicles, robots and drones) and delivering enhanced capability to many existing things (such as Internet of Things [IoT] connected consumer and industrial systems).
4. Digital Twin
A digital twin refers to the digital representation of a real-world entity or system.
Digital twins in the context of IoT projects is particularly promising over the next three to five years and is leading the interest in digital twins today.
5. Cloud to the Edge
Edge computing describes a computing topology in which information processing, and content collection and delivery, are placed closer to the sources of this information.
Connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and greater functionality embedded at the edge favours distributed models. Enterprises should begin using edge design patterns in their infrastructure architectures — particularly for those with significant IoT elements.
6. Conversational Platforms
Conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world.
The burden of translating intent shifts from user to computer. The platform takes a question or command from the user and then responds by executing some function, presenting some content or asking for additional input.
7. Immersive Experience
While conversational interfaces are changing how people control the digital world, virtual, augmented and mixed reality are changing the way that people perceive and interact with the digital world.
The virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) market is currently adolescent and fragmented. Interest is high, resulting in many novelty VR applications that deliver little real business value outside of advanced entertainment, such as video games and 360-degree spherical videos.
8. Blockchain
Blockchain is evolving from a digital currency infrastructure into a platform for digital transformation.
Blockchain technologies offer a radical departure from the current centralised transaction and record-keeping mechanisms and can serve as a foundation of disruptive digital business for both established enterprises and startups.
9. Event Driven
Central to digital business is the idea that the business is always sensing and ready to exploit new digital business moments.
Business events could be anything that is noted digitally, reflecting the discovery of notable states or state changes, for example, completion of a purchase order, or an aircraft landing.
With the use of event brokers, IoT, cloud computing, blockchain, in-memory data management and AI, business events can be detected faster and analysed in greater detail.
10. Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust
To securely enable digital business initiatives in a world of advanced, targeted attacks, security and risk management leaders must adopt a continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) approach to allow real-time, risk and trust-based decision making with adaptive responses.
