Extended immersive experiences, accelerated artificial intelligence, and optimized technologist delivery are the three themes spanning the products and services of the 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.
Gartner has listed 25 technologies that it believes will have significant business and social impact over the next 10 years and help IT leaders drive digital business transformation.
Technology development is plotted along a bell curve that shows how expectations of a technology (the Y-axis) change over time (the X-axis) from inception to acceptance. The hype stages begin with the trigger of innovation, leading to the peak of inflated expectations, then the trough of disillusionment and finally the slope of enlightenment and the plateau of productivity. Almost all of the 25 technologies are still in the first two stages, according to this year’s chart.
Gartner sees the theme of evolving and expanding immersive experiences playing out in digital twins, virtual locations, and cryptocurrencies. A digital twin of a customer or user that can mimic and anticipate customer behavior can help organizations improve customer experience and support other digital products and services.
Other technologies enabling immersive experiences include decentralized identity, in which users can control their identity through digital wallets or blockchain applications. Digital or virtual humans, non-fungible tokens, and the metaverse fall under this theme, as do internal talent markets, which pair employees with projects without human involvement. The Web3 technology stack will be essential for the development of decentralized web applications that allow users to control their own identity and data.
The second theme of accelerated AI can be seen in autonomous systems, which are self-managing physical or software systems that have autonomy, agency, and the ability to learn. Five to ten years from now, autonomous systems “will be transformational for organizations,” Gartner said. Examples of these technologies include causal AI which understands cause and effect relationships, machine learning-based code generation tools, and AI-augmented design which uses AI for user flows. , designs, and content and presentation layers.
Gartner’s third theme, Optimized Technologist Delivery, refers to communities of product or service creators and the platforms they use. Cloud data ecosystems, for example, provide an environment that supports a range of data workloads, streamlined delivery, and simple functionality. Some of the technologies in this category include AI-augmented FinOps and cloud services that deliver sustainability benefits within economic, environmental, and social systems. Another emerging technology under this theme is data observability, the ability to understand the health of an organization’s data ecosystem by continuously monitoring, tracking, alerting, analyzing and troubleshooting incidents.
According to the chart, decentralized identity, NFTs and cloud data ecosystems are the most advanced. Technologies with 10+ years of productivity include Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture, Metaverse, and Digital Humans.
“All of these technologies are at an early stage, but some are in the embryonic stage, and great uncertainty exists as to how they will evolve,” said Melissa Davis, VP analyst at Gartner. “Embryo technologies have greater risks for deployment, but potentially greater benefits for early adopters.”
