Every year, I find it interesting to look at Gartner's top 10 technology trends for the year ahead. As usual, Gartner Fellow David Cearley presented this year's list, and like last year, he organized the 10 trends in a framework relating to building an "Intelligent Digital Mesh." Note that in contrast to Gartner's annual list of predictions, this list is much more oriented to things that the research firm believes CIOs and other senior IT executives should be focusing on for the coming year, with an emphasis on the budgeting and planning season many are now in.
This year, Cearley pointed out the interest in and growing number of intelligence services, how digital information is increasingly needed to connect to the real world, and the need for a mesh, or a secure set of connections between technology, services, and data.
Here are this year's trends, divided into the categories Intelligence, Digital, and Mesh.
Intelligence
1. AI Foundation.
Cearley talked about the growing interest in AI this year, and how machine learning has matured, based on a massive amount of reliable data, new algorithms, and massive amounts of processing. This will result in new applications and changes to existing applications. He emphasized that the focus is on "narrow AI," or specific systems, rather than general AI.
Gartner predicts that 30 percent of CIOs will include AI in their top five investment priorities. Cearley said this estimate might be conservative, as inquiries on AI have grown 500 percent in the past year. He also said 30 percent of new development components are delivered by joint teams of data scientists and programmers.
2. Intelligent Apps and Analytics.
Cearley talked about how today we have AI included in packaged applications, such as Salesforce's Einstein or SAP's ERP analytics. He talked about augmented data discovery and analysis to autogenerate models and make this data available for "citizen data scientists." Over the next few years, Cearley said he expects 90 percent of the business intelligence tools to add natural language processing.
In addition, he talked about virtual assistants, with a focus on those designed for the health care industry, such as Sensley's Virtual Nurse, and Red's method of improving the discharge process. He also talked about providing services to customer service agents, as AI really should be thought of as “augmented intelligence.”
3. Intelligent Things. This includes consumer devices and healthcare tools such as a digital stethoscope or MRI machine. Cearley said people are talking about things like robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles—such as an autonomous ship to deliver fertilizer in Norway, or autonomous cars. But in the near future, he expects these will work mainly in prescribed, controlled and regulated environments, before graduating to general environments (such as unrestricted driving). And he talked about multiple drones and other things working together to create "swarm intelligence." Cearley also mentioned an Air Force model that includes machines talking to each other and to people.
Digital
In the Digital area, Cearley really focused on IoT elements, repeating Gartner's prediction that the Internet of Things (IoT) will save consumers and businesses $1 trillion a year in maintenance, services, and consumables by 2022.
4. Digital Twin. These are digital representations of real world objects, such as a model of an engine, for applications that include monitoring, analysis, and simulation. But Cearley said it's not only the function of the model that matters, but also how it drives business value through observation, optimization, and operation. His examples included GE monitoring aircraft engines, with some airlines reporting reducing downtime by 30 to 50 percent. He also talked about digital twins in use for optimization on a wind farm, where they are used to ascertain how best to adjust blade orientation.
Cearley said that an enterprise's own ecosystem is often in conflict with a tech provider's ecosystem, which leads to questions about who owns the IP and the data, so he urged the audience to be careful when confronting these issues. He said we have "digital twins" of assets now, but in 3-5 years we will need broader digital entities, such as twins for people (already available in things like Facebook) and business processes.
5. Cloud to the Edge. This is the concept that some devices, such as PCs or mobile devices, run on the edge, while other things are centralized, such as in the cloud. This swings back and forth, and Cearley said that "everything old is new again." One trend here is using cloud as a point of coordination or control for the edge, with examples such as Office 365, which is managed in the cloud, but has the traditional desktop Office software on the edge, as well as Amazon Web Service's Greengrass. In the long run, he expects to see more of a balance.
6. Conversational Platforms. The important thing here is "flipping the paradigm," so that instead of people adjusting to technology, the technology will adjust to people, Cearley said. Most organizations will actually have different platforms for different applications, and he said to watch for competition between platform vendors, system vendors, and even application vendors, over the next five years. This is still in the early days, he said, and won't be limited to voice sensing alone, but will grow to include other sensors.
7. Immersive Experience. Gartner expects that by 2020, the market for head-mounted virtual and augmented reality devices will exceed 35 million devices and generate $75 billion in revenue. Cearley pushed the concept of "mixed reality" with lots of sensors, and gave examples featuring companies such as Sotheby's, Idea, and the Void. From now until 2022, he suggested enterprises look more at specific solutions, and said that more comprehensive platforms should emerge after that.
Mesh
In this area, Cearley focused on business processes and information security.
8. Blockchain. Cearley focused on blockchain as a shared and distributed mesh, which is independent of an individual application, but has so far been used mainly in financial services and government. He said about 40 percent of the total value of blockchain will come from supply change management. By 2022, Gartner predicts that 30 percent of higher education institutions will be using blockchain for educational credentials. However, he acknowledged that there are barriers to the broader use of blockchain, and discussed these.
9. Event-Driven Model. We're increasingly moving toward systems that are controlled by specific events, rather than more traditional programming requests. This is being driven by the move to digital business, Cearley said, and added that by 2020, participation in 80 percent of new business ecosystems will require support for event processing. He talked about changes in this model, including serverless development, but said both event-based and structured applications will be around for a long time.
10. Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust (CARTA). This was a new buzzword to me, but Cearley talked about CARTA as being necessary to deal with all of the changes that are constantly happening in an environment. I've more often heard many of these concepts described as SecDevOps: security, development, and ops all brought together. Cearley talked about more specific requirements, such as automated testing, roll-based security, and training developers to understand security, as well as new ways of identifying the bad guys. By 2020, he said, 25 percent of new digital business initiatives will adopt a CARTA approach, up from less than 5 percent in 2017.
Cearley concluded by saying that connecting all these trends together is what will be crucial for IT leaders, saying "Your future can be bright if you approach it right."