Gartner picks emerging technologies that can drive differentiation for enterprises

Gartner has released its latest Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, giving a glimpse at 25 embryonic and early-stage technological advances that can help enterprises differentiate and drive growth in the coming years.

Modern organizations are racing to innovate to stay ahead of the competition and drive technology-enabled business transformation. They are watching market trends, but with hundreds of advances happening worldwide and the surrounding publicity, it becomes difficult to separate hype from reality.

This is where Gartner’s Hype Cycle comes in. The company aims to cut through the noise to identify the most potent technologies. It drills into where each technology trend stand in terms of maturity, giving chief experience officers a way to make the right investment decision according to their business needs.

Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, 2022

This year’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies focuses on systems and applied frameworks that evolve/expand immersive experiences, accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) automation and optimize solution delivery. 

For immersive experiences, which offer new ways of engagement with dynamic virtual representations, the technologies of interest are decentralized identity, digital humans, digital twin of the customer, internal talent marketplaces, metaverse, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), super apps and Web3. 

Most of these, Gartner notes, promise transformational benefits and are likely to see mainstream adoption in two to ten years. Only metaverse and digital humans are expected to take more than a decade to hit the plateau of productivity.

On the AI front, the emerging technologies with potential are autonomic systems, causal AI, foundation models, generative design AI and machine learning code generation. They all promise to expand the adoption of AI with more accurate predictions as well as faster time to expected benefits. According to Gartner, these technologies will mostly be transformational for businesses and see maturity in five to ten years.

Finally, to accelerate and optimize product, service and solution delivery, Gartner has identified technologies that provide feedback and insight. This includes augmented finops, cloud data ecosystems, cloud sustainability, computational storage, cybersecurity mesh architecture, data observability, dynamic risk governance, industry cloud platforms, minimum viable architecture, observability-driven development, open telemetry and platform engineering. Most of these are also expected to mature within two to 10 years.

Advantages are yet to be seen

While all these technologies are disruptive by nature, it is important that enterprises first understand the short-term and long-term opportunities they present for their business and industry and then make an investment. All these technologies, Gartner emphasized, are currently at an embryonic or early stage. The competitive advantages they could provide are not yet understood or proven. Without proper assessment and exploration of use cases, one could easily end up with the wrong solution.

“All technologies on this Hype Cycle are at an early stage, but some are nascent and great uncertainty exists about how they will evolve. Such technologies present greater risks for deployment, but potentially greater benefits for early adopters who can assess and exploit them in line with their organization’s ability to handle unproven technologies,” Gary Olliffe, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, noted.

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