Gartner, a research and consulting company in the IT sector, has released its list of the top ten strategic technology trends that businesses should be aware of in 2024. It’s not surprising that different types of AI are ranked first, second, and third.
As Gartner’s Vice President Analyst Bart Willemsen explains, these strategic technology trends will influence business and technology decisions over the next three years:
… “These innovations can assist your organization in building and protecting itself while also adding value.
Some are driven by AI, while others assist you in operating and growing effectively and safely as customer expectations and business models evolve as a result of AI.
Some of these technologies may have been pioneered by you already, while others may be new to you, but they all help you establish the infrastructure, governance, and tools that your organization and its employees require as we move toward enhanced resilience and autonomic activities.”
Bart Willmemsen, VP Analyst at Gartner
When used correctly, these technologies provide benefits such as:
Trust and confidence in your ability to use AI safely
Activities that are sustainable within the ecosystem in which you operate
Technologies tailored to specific tasks, industries, and functions
Increased speed and productivity with minimal additional investment or effort
increased value for internal and external stakeholders
Whether and when you adopt these advanced technologies, is determined first and foremost by your organization’s business objectives and current starting point. You are not providing true value unless you meet business objectives.
The Top Strategic Tech Trends for 2024
These will be the top technology trends in 2024 according to Gartner:
Democratized generative AI
AI trust, Risk, And Security Management
AI-Augmented Development
Intelligent Applications
Augmented-Connected Workforce
Machine Customers
Continuous Threat Exposure Management
Sustainable Technology
Platform Engineering
Industry Cloud Platforms
According To Gartner, Each Of The Latest Technology Trends Is Related To One Or More Key Business Themes
Protecting and preserving past and future investments,
Building the right solutions for the right stakeholders at the right time, and
Delivering value for the changing environment of both internal and external customers.
Image source: Gartner
Theme 1: Protect Your Investment
To ensure that your technology investments have a long-term impact, be:
- Deliberate. Stop all uncontrolled experiments with insufficient guidance. Efforts should be deliberate and produce useful results for daily use.
- Realistic. Calculate the ROI of projects by including all necessary safeguards from the start.
- Forward-looking. Design innovations with reuse in mind while securing your rights (i.e., intellectual property and creation ownership) and a long-term position.
This category includes the following technology trends:
- AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)
- Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
- Industry Cloud Platforms
- Sustainable Technology
- Democratized Generative AI
Image source: Gartner
Theme 2: Rise Of The Builders
Unleash the inventiveness of the numerous communities that create applications and solutions by:
- Using technology that is specific to your industry, organizational needs, and specialist workers.
- Creating your roadmap so that non-specialists can create.
- Collaboration with business stakeholders on software delivery and portfolio life cycle management.
This theme’s technology trends for 2024 are as follows:
- Platform Engineering
- AI-Augmented Development
- Industry Cloud Platforms
- Intelligent Applications
- Sustainable Technology
- Democratized Generative AI
Image source: Gartner
Theme 3: Deliver The Value
Refine and accelerate how you improve stakeholder experience, and broaden your revenue-generating options by:
- Continually adapting to changing internal and external customer demands in order to establish a virtuous cycle of value determination and delivery.
- Approaches for algorithm-based customers, whose influence is growing rapidly.
- Providing controlled access to rapidly evolving digital tools, whether they are related to generative AI, workforce skilling and migration, or other augmentation and automation opportunities.
This theme’s IT trends are as follows:
- Machine Customers
- Augmented Connected Workforce
- Intelligent Applications
- Sustainable technology
- Democratized Generative AI
Image source: Gartner
Top Strategic Tech Trends for 2024
Democratized generative AI
According to Gartner, this is defined as the convergence of massively pre-trained models, cloud computing, and open source, as well as making these models available to workers worldwide. According to the firm, by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used GenAI APIs and models and/or deployed GenAI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5% in early 2023.
Why Is It Trending?
- Opening up access to generative artificial intelligence across the organization has the potential to automate a wide range of tasks, increasing productivity, lowering costs, and opening up new opportunities for growth.
- It has the potential to change the way almost all businesses compete and work.
- There will be democratization of information and skills across a wide range of roles and business functions.
- Natural language conversational interfaces can make vast amounts of information — both internal and external — accessible and available to business users.
AI Trust, Risk And Security Management
By 2026, enterprises that apply TRiSM controls to AI applications will improve decision-making accuracy by eliminating 80% of faulty and illegitimate data.
Why is it trendy?
Those who actively use AI TRiSM controls put more AI projects into production, achieve more business value, and have improved model precision and consistency.
Organizations that use TRiSM-managed AI models can improve decision bias control while increasing fairness in AI-driven applications.
Model monitoring must be used to continuously test the explainability of AI models. This ensures that original AI model explanations and interpretations are still active during model operations.
AI-Augmented Development
AI-augmented development is the use of artificial intelligence technologies, such as GenAI and machine learning, to assist software engineers in designing, coding and testing applications, according to Gartner. AI-assisted software engineering allows software engineers to spend less time writing code.
These AI-infused development tools make it possible for software engineers to spend more time on more strategic activities, such as the design and composition of compelling business applications. This improves developer productivity and enables development teams to address the increasing demand for software to run the business, Gartner said.
Intelligent Applications
According to Gartner, intelligent applications are those that have learned to respond appropriately and autonomously to better augment or automate work. According to Gartner, intelligence in applications includes a variety of AI-based services such as machine learning, vector stores, and connected data.
“A clear need and demand for intelligent applications exists,” the firm stated, noting that the ongoing talent shortage was cited as the most damaging risk for their organization by 26% of CEOs in Gartner’s 2023 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. CEO respondents identified attracting and retaining talent as their top workforce priority, and AI as the technology that will have the greatest impact on their industries in the next three years.
Augmented-Connected Workforce
The need to scale and accelerate talent is driving the trend toward an augmented-connected workforce, a strategy for maximizing the value of human workers. According to Gartner, the ACWF uses intelligent applications and workforce analytics to support the workforce’s experience, well-being, and ability to develop its own skills. It also drives business outcomes.
According to the firm, 25% of CIOs will use augmented-connected workforce initiatives to reduce time to competency for key roles by 50% by 2027.
Machine Customers
According to Gartner, machine customers, also known as “custobots,” are nonhuman economic actors who can autonomously negotiate and purchase goods and services in exchange for payment.
The firm predicts that by 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the years ahead.
The future of commerce is not only about human consumers, but also about intelligent products that can act as customers on their own.
According to a report, by 2028, there will be 15 billion connected products in the world, such as smart speakers, wearables, vehicles, and appliances, that can communicate, learn, and make decisions. These products will have the potential to buy, sell, and trade goods and services with other products or humans, creating a new market of product-to-product (P2P) commerce.
The report estimates that P2P commerce will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030, and will be more significant than the arrival of digital commerce. This means that companies will be able to create their own customers, and will need to adapt their strategies and operations to cater to this new virtual reality front.
Continuous Threat Exposure Management
According to Gartner, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a CTEM program will see a two-thirds reduction in breaches by 2026.
A new approach to security is to align exposure assessment cycles with specific business projects or critical threat vectors, rather than following a periodic scan-and-patch model.
This approach addresses both patchable and unmatchable exposures, such as misconfigurations, weak passwords, or outdated software, that can pose a risk to the enterprise. The exposure and remediation priorities of the enterprise are validated by weighing in the attacker’s view and testing the effectiveness of security controls, such as firewalls, encryption, or authentication.
This way, the enterprise can focus on the most relevant and impactful exposures, and not waste resources on low-risk ones.
The expected outcomes from this approach are not only tactical and technical responses, but also evidence-based security optimizations supported by improved cross-team mobilization. This means that the security team can collaborate better with other teams, such as IT, development, or business, and provide data science-driven insights and recommendations to enhance the overall security posture of the enterprise
Sustainable Technology
Gartner defines sustainable technology as a framework of digital offerings used to enable environmental, social, and governance outcomes. This is becoming more popular as people become more concerned about the environmental impact of technologies like AI, cryptocurrency, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 25% of CIOs’ personal compensation will be linked to their sustainable technology impact.
Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is the process of creating and running self-service internal development platforms that all have a layer and are created and maintained by a dedicated product team. According to Gartner, the platforms are designed to support their users’ needs by integrating with tools and processes.
Platform engineering aims to improve productivity and user experience for business leaders while also accelerating the delivery of business value.
Industry Cloud Platforms
According to Gartner, industry cloud platforms address industry-specific business outcomes by combining underlying SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services into a whole product offering with composable capabilities. An industry data fabric, a library of packaged business capabilities, and composition tools are typical components.
Summing Up
However, do not blindly adopt these trends without considering your specific needs, challenges, and opportunities.
Evaluate each trend carefully and determine how it can fit into your digital strategy and deliver real benefits to your business.
Remember, technology is not a silver bullet, but a tool to empower your organization and create a competitive edge in the market. By choosing the right latest technology trends, and applying them wisely, you can transform your business and achieve your desired outcomes.
