Gartner has identified ten strategic technology trends it believes will prove most critical in the year ahead.
A strategic technology trend, as defined by Gartner, is one with substantial disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an emerging state into broader impact and use, or which are rapidly growing trends with a high degree of volatility reaching tipping points over the next five years.
Here are the top 10 strategic technology predictions for 2018:
AI Foundation
AI is slated to drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025. But given that AI technology is evolving rapidly, organizations will have to invest significantly in skills, processes and tools to leverage it. It is advisable that businesses focus on custom solutions that address specific tasks or objectives such as data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
Intelligent Apps and Analytics
Over the next few years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI. Gartner predicts that augmented analytics will be a strategic growth area to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing. Businesses should start exploring intelligent apps that add value in terms of advanced analytics, intelligent processes and advanced user experiences.
Intelligent Things
With the increasing proliferation of the IoT, AI is driving the future of intelligent things like autonomous cars and enhancing the capabilities of connected consumer and industrial systems. Manufacturers will keep testing the technology more rigorously and come up with ways for intelligent things to operate more autonomously i.e. with minimal human intervention. However, semi autonomous applications are expected to dominate for the next 5 years.
Digital Twin
A digital twin is the digital representation of a real entity or system, for instance a factory. Linked to its real world counterpart through IoT, a digital twin improves decision making by understanding understand the state of the thing or system and responding to changes. Hero MotoCorp is one of the first automobile companies in India to have created a digital twin, for it manufacturing facility in Vadodara. As we gradually shift to an integrated digital twin approach, city planners, digital marketers, healthcare professionals and industrial planners will benefit it.
Cloud to the Edge
Edge Computing describes a computing topology in which the compute resources are placed closer to the information sources. This gives businesses a way to beat connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and come up with ways to embed greater functionality at the edge. Gartner advises to view edge as complimentary to Cloud, wherein the Cloud functions as a service-led centralized structure, with edge provides more processing power at the distributed information-heavy touch points.
Conversational Platforms
Chatbots have found increasing application, given users’ preference to interact with technology in an unstructured way. Conversational platforms will drive how technology is designed over the next few years, eliminating or minimizing the need for a user to learn how to interact with a certain device or touch point.
Immersive Experience
Interest in technologies like AR and VR has primarily resulted in novelty applications that deliver little real business value outside of advanced entertainment, such as video games and 360-degree spherical videos. Mixed reality, that combines the technical functionality of AR and VR, is now becoming the immersive experience of choice by working with IoT technology to better match how people interact with devices. Existing examples of mixed reality include head-mounted displays (HMDs) and AR-based smart phones or tablets using environmental sensors.
Blockchain
Originally developed as the accounting method for the virtual currency Bitcoin, blockchains – which use what’s known as distributed ledger technology (DLT) – are a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. The trend has primarily found applications in the finance industry. While the next few years are expected to bear more hype than tangible benefit, industries including government, healthcare, manufacturing, media distribution and others would do well to start exploring associated opportunities.
Event Driven
Digital business moments, for instance completion of a purchase order, or an aircraft landing, have the potential to drive digital business. As IT leaders embrace ‘digital thinking,’ real-time data can be detected more rapidly and analyzed in greater detail, leading to better business decisions. According to Gartner, this requires a larger shift to ‘event thinking’ by business leaders along with integration of technologies such as conversational platforms and IoT.
Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust
In a world with an increasing risk 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. Security infrastructure must be adaptive everywhere, to manage the risks involved in delivering security that is as agile as digital business itself.