Introduce

Gartner has published the Ebook 𝐓𝐨𝐩 𝟏𝟎 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬 that will factor into business and technology decisions over the next three years.
Gartner urges you to evaluate the impacts and benefits of each technology trend to determine which innovation — or strategic combination — will significantly impact your organization’s success.

Learn more about each trend and how to get started below.

AI as Partner: AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)

Supports AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, transparency and data protection.

Gartner predicts that By 2026, enterprises that apply TRiSM controls to AI applications will increase the accuracy of their decision-making by eliminating 80% of faulty and illegitimate information.

Why trending?

• Those who actively use AI TRiSM controls move more of their AI projects into production, achieve more business value, and experience enhanced model precision and consistency, than those who don’t.
• Organizations that use AI models managed with TRiSM can enhance bias control in decisions while increasing fairness in AI-driven applications.
• AI model explainability must be constantly tested through model monitoring. This ensures that original explanations and interpretations of AI models remain active during model operations.

How to get started?

• Set up a task force or dedicated unit to manage your AI TRiSM efforts.
• Work across your organization to effectively manage best-of-breed toolsets as part of a comprehensive AI TRiSM program.
• Define acceptable use policies, and establish a system to methodically record and approve access to AI models and attestations of actual uses.

Be Safe: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

A pragmatic and systemic approach to continuously adjust cybersecurity optimization priorities.

Gartner predicts that By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a CTEM program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches.

Why trending?

• This approach to security aligns exposure assessment cycles with specific business projects or critical threat vectors.
• Both patchable (vulnerabilities) and unpatchable exposures are addressed.
• The exposure and remediation priorities of the enterprise are validated by weighing in the attacker’s view and testing the effectiveness of security controls.
• Expected outcomes from the tactical and technical response are shifted to evidence-based security optimizations supported by improved cross-team mobilization.

How to get started?

• Integrate CTEM consistently with risk awareness and management programs to provide a relatable business-led focus and business value-based prioritization of exposure mitigation.
• When expanding a vulnerability management program, get momentum with operational wins that frequently lie in improving the prioritization of findings through validation techniques.
• Embrace cybersecurity validation technologies to augment your existing prioritization workflows and enhance cybersecurity readiness.

Protect the Future: Sustainable Technology

A framework of digital solutions used to enable environmental, social and governance (ESG) outcomes that support long-term ecological balance and human rights.

Gartner predicts that By 2027, 25% of CIOs will have compensation linked to their sustainable technology impact.

Why trending?

• Environmental technologies prevent, mitigate and adapt to risks in the natural world.
• Social technologies improve human rights outcomes, well-being and prosperity.
• Governance technologies strengthen business conduct, oversight and capacity building.
• Sustainable technologies provide insights necessary for improving overall performance.

How to get started?

• Select technologies that will help drive sustainability in your industry and that are identified as priority for the business and key stakeholders. This may include cloud services, AI and others.
• Involve your ethics board in developing a roadmap for structured decision making. Instead of finding trade-offs, pursue optimization of any value in favor of improved overall organizational sustainability
• Use the Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Sustainability, 2023, to find the right balance between the well-established and leading-edge technologies for your enterprise sustainability.

Developer-Driven Self-Service: Platform Engineering

The discipline of building and operating self-service internal platforms — each platform is a layer, created and maintained by a dedicated product team, designed to support the needs of its users by interfacing with tools and processes.

Gartner predicts that By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

Why trending?

• This practice optimizes the developer experience and accelerates delivery of business value.
• It reduces cognitive load through improvement of the developer experience and productivity.
• Developers’ abilities to independently run, manage and develop their applications are improved, while ensuring reliability and security.
• Key talent retention is also improved.

How to get started?

• Curate and build internal platforms with reusable, composable, configurable platform components, knowledge and services.
• Treat the platform as a product. Work with end users to identify and prioritize whatever technical capabilities, tools and processes are most useful to them, and then build a platform around that.
• Build a product management culture, with routine collaboration between platform engineers and the end users they serve, where they can share bidirectional feedback in a safe and productive environment.

Accelerate Creation: AI-Augmented Development

The use of AI technologies, such as generative AI and machine learning (ML), to aid software engineers in creating, testing and delivering applications.

Gartner predicts that By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023.

Why trending?

• AI-augmented development tools integrate with an engineer’s development environment to produce application code, translate legacy code to modern languages, enable design-to-code transformation and enhance application testing capabilities.
• AI-assisted software engineering improves developer productivity and enables development teams to address this increasing demand for software to run the business.
• AI-infused development tools allow software engineers to spend less time writing code, facilitating an increased focus on higher-level activities, such as the design and composition of compelling business applications.

How to get started?

• Establish a team of senior software engineers who can evaluate AI code generation tools to determine the best way to deploy and use these tools.
• Evaluate and deploy AI testing tools, as these will become mandatory elements of your application testing processes.
• Select or establish a design system with reusable UI design and front-end components, and enable this design system with design-to-code capabilities.

Tailor Your Tailor’s Work: Industry Cloud Platforms

Address industry-relevant business outcomes by combining underlying SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services into a whole product offering with composable capabilities.

Gartner predicts that By 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023.

Why trending?

• Industry cloud platforms (ICPs) are tailored cloud proposals specific to your industry and can further be tailored to your individual organization’s needs.
• IT leaders can use the composability of these platforms to gain the adaptability and agility to respond to accelerating disruption in their organization’s industry.
• ICPs deliver on industry-specific outcomes that are relevant to the mission-critical priorities of the vertical segment.
• Technology and IT leaders can use the composable approach that ICPs take toward creating industrywide capabilities by (re)composing a differentiating proposition, which is unique for their customer and partner ecosystem.

How to get started?

• Use ICPs to complement the existing portfolio of applications (like an exoskeleton) by introducing new capabilities that add significant value, rather than starting by replacing existing capabilities.
• Create rules for when ICP functions should be deployed as production platforms to optimize and modernize by enhancing existing processes, and when
  these functions should be actively restructured to enable more differentiated transformation and innovation initiatives.
• Begin building composability capabilities by engaging enterprise technologists and fusion teams to build enterprisewide understanding and support for the ICP journey.

Optimize Decision-Making: Intelligent Applications

Consumer or business applications that are augmented with AI and various connected data from transactions and external sources.

Gartner predicts that By 2026, 30% of new apps will use AI to drive personalized adaptive user interfaces, up from under 5% today.

Why trending?

• Generative AI can truly make apps more intelligent — transforming the experience of customers, users, product owners, architects and developers.
• Infused with data from transactions and external sources, intelligent applications push insights within apps business users already use, so they won’t need separate business intelligence tools to assess and understand the state of their business.
• AI can add predictions or recommendations, instead of more procedural features, allowing apps to be tailored to the user, improving outcomes and advancing data-driven decision making.

How to get started?

• Establish a center of excellence or similar team to capture, explain, catalog, map and monitor the breadth and depth of intelligence as a capability for your apps.
• Assess how intelligent applications transform the scope, purpose and functionality of your enterprise apps.
• Establish a clear and shared understanding of intelligent applications and their potential use cases throughout your organization.
• Evaluate the impact on your wider portfolio of apps and services as you expand the range and scope of intelligent applications in the medium to long term.

Power AND Responsibility: Democratized Generative AI

The ability to create net new content (images, speech, text and more) and its widespread availability will democratize access to information and skills, making
it one of the most disruptive trends of this decade.

Gartner predicts that By 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs, models and/or deployed generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, an increase from fewer than 5% today.

Why trending?

• Democratizing access to generative AI across the organization offers the potential to automate a broad range of tasks, boosting productivity, reducing costs and offering new opportunities for growth.
• It has the ability to transform the way virtually all enterprises compete and do work.
• Democratization of information and skills across a broad set of roles and business functions will follow.
• Vast sources of information — both internal and external — can be made accessible and available to business users via natural language conversational interfaces.

How to get started?

• Create a prioritized matrix of generative AI use cases based on technical feasibility and tangible business value, and clearly outline a time frame for piloting, deployment and production across these use cases.
• Employ a change management approach that prioritizes employee training and well-being by equipping them with the knowledge to use generative AI tools safely and confidently, while reassuring them on how these tools will be an assistant to them in automating routine tasks.
• Build a portfolio of quick wins and differentiating and transformational generative AI use cases that combine initiatives with hard ROI and those delivering benefits and competitive advantage that are difficult to initially quantify directly in financial terms.

Push the Pioneers: Augmented Connected Workforce

A strategy to optimize the value delivered by human staff by establishing a connective tissue that optimizes the use of intelligent technology, workforce analytics and skill augmentation to accelerate and scale talent building.

Why trending?

• This strategy accelerates new (digital) skills required for work — across all job types.
• It provides the opportunity for digital tools to reduce time to competency for new hires.
• Smarter work will be made possible through advancements in workplace automation and AI, requiring the workforce to be increasingly able to manage complex issues.

How to get started?

• Prioritize time to competency for inexperienced workers who perform in highly complex environments — quantify results such as faster onboarding.
• Create a cross-functional program consisting of leaders from IT, HR, sales, customer service and supply chain; as a group, decide which workforce segments to prioritize investment in and which outcomes to pursue.
• Design employee experiences that are augmented with intelligent technology.
• Create insights and guided recommendations that help employees accomplish what would otherwise be impossible within existing constraints of time and cognitive capacity.

Buyers With Byte(s): Machine Customers

Nonhuman economic actors that purchase goods and services in exchange for payment.

Gartner predicts that By 2028, machine customers will render 20% of human-readable digital storefronts obsolete.

Why trending?

• For the first time in human history, companies will be able to make their own customers.
• By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years.
• They will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030 and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce.

How to get started?

• Create a Machine Customer Investigation team by enlisting senior representatives from strategy, IT, product development, sales, marketing, supply chain and service.
• Create one to three scenarios that explore the market opportunities, such as the Internet-of-Things-enabled products that might arise in the situations/activities where customers use your products and services today.
• Start architecting the data sources and API platform needed to serve machine customers who should not or will not use your human-readable digital storefront.

Source: Gartner

𝑆𝐸𝑇𝐴 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝐼𝑇 𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 (𝑚𝑜𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒𝑏 𝑎𝑝𝑝) 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 14 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑠 𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦, 𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒, ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒, 𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒. 𝑊𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑥𝑡-𝑔𝑒𝑛 𝑡𝑒𝑐ℎ 𝐴𝐼, 𝐼𝑜𝑇, 𝐵𝑖𝑔𝐷𝑎𝑡𝑎 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐵𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑘𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑙 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡’𝑠 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑠. 𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑑𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑠, 𝑙𝑒𝑡’𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑆𝐸𝑇𝐴’𝑠 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔.