Gartner identifies three main themes:
- Expanding immersive experiences
These technologies enable IT organizations to provide new ways to reach customers to strengthen or open up new revenue streams. This includes topics like digital twin, metaverse or NFT (non-fungible tokens). Given the current hype, it is surprising that Gartner expects most of these technologies to take more than 10 years to become mainstream.
- Accelerated artificial intelligence automation
Gartner sees automation as a major enabler of broader AI application which they consider as an important driver of digitization of companies. This includes topics like autonomic systems, causal AI, generative design AI and machine learning code generation. Gartner expects these technologies to take 5 to 10 years to mainstream adoption.
- Optimized technologist delivery
These technologies improve speed in building a digital business and sustainability in running it. This includes topics like cloud data ecosystems, cybersecurity mesh architecture, minimum viable architecture and open telemetry. Gartner expects mainstream adoption in 2 to 5 years.
Even if you do not agree with all elements of Gartner’s assessment this is inspiring food for thought. It will help you to assess which emerging technologies could become relevant for your product or company when, and when is the appropriate time to look into the technology in more detail.
In case you are not familiar with Gartner’s hype cycle: The heuristics behind this say that any new technology moves through the hype cycle. First there is a lot of positive hype, then people make first practical experiences and get disillusioned before the technology matures, people learn how to use it, and it becomes mainstream. The time it takes for a technology to go through this cycle can differ between a few years and several decades. Some technologies die before maturity.
Over the last few years, Gartner has stopped showing technologies on the right side of the hype cycle. If you want to learn about technologies that are closer to becoming mainstream you need to look into some of Gartner’s more than 100 more specialized hype cycle reports which are not for free.
For Gartner’s (free) post, see https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-the-2022-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies. Source of graphics: Gartner.