Leading drivers of disruption include hyperautomation, blockchain, AI security, distributed cloud, and autonomous things. These digital trends are beginning to shift from an emerging state toward broader adoption and impact. Over the next 5 to 10 years, these technological trends will drive significant transformations and unlock valuable opportunities, giving rise to "people-centric smart spaces."
Gartner experts define a smart space as "a physical environment in which people and technology-enabled systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated, and intelligent ecosystems. Multiple elements—including people, processes, services, and things—come together in a smart space to create a more immersive, interactive, and automated experience." For example, in this new landscape, Artificial Intelligence (AI) through Machine Learning (ML), combined with hyperautomation and edge computing, could converge to create highly integrated smart buildings and urban spaces.
Digital Trends for 2020
The top 10 technology trends are summarized below:
- Hyperautomation: Defined as the combination of multiple Machine Learning (ML) tools, packaged software, and automation tools to deliver work. It refers not only to the breadth of the toolset but also to all stages of automation itself (discover, analyze, design, automate, measure, monitor, and reassess). Hyperautomation will not be achieved through a single tool, but rather through a combination of several.
- Multiexperience: Technology will expand its scope of interaction to include multisensory and multitouch interfaces. Immersive experiences will leverage augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality, multichannel human-machine interfaces, and sensing technologies.
- Democratization: This trend focuses on providing easy access to technical or business expertise without requiring extensive (and costly) training, largely supported by AI. This applies across several domains: data and analytics, development, design, and IT expertise.
- Human Augmentation: Emerging technologies will be used to enhance physical and cognitive capabilities and human experiences.
- Transparency and Traceability: The trust crisis driven by technological evolution, privacy concerns, and security issues will propel concepts such as "explainable AI" and "AI governance." Additionally, regulations like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will set fundamental rules for organizations.
- Empowered Edge Computing: Bringing processing, content collection, and delivery closer to the source of information will help reduce latency. Internet of Things (IoT) technology will play a pivotal role here.
- Distributed Cloud: Public cloud services will be distributed to physical locations outside the provider's traditional data centers. This will address technical challenges like latency, as well as regulatory issues like data sovereignty.
- Autonomous Things: Drones, robots, ships, and appliances—whether semi-autonomous or fully autonomous and driven by AI—will proliferate to handle tasks typically performed by humans, expanding beyond controlled environments into open public spaces.
- Practical Blockchain: This technology will enable asset tracking back to its origin—such as tracing foodborne illnesses back to the original supplier—and allow untrusted parties to exchange value without a central authority, a practice already underway. This technology is expected to be fully scalable by 2023.
- AI Security: This trend will deploy across three key fronts: protecting AI-powered systems (securing AI training data, training pipelines, and ML models), leveraging AI/ML to enhance and automate cybersecurity processes, and anticipating the malicious use of AI by cyber attackers.
In Gartner's “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020” report, you can explore concrete use cases and delve deeper into the conceptual framework behind these 2020 tech trends. Can you think of any other trends that might take off starting next year? We invite you to share your thoughts!