Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020

Gartner listed the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020. The top 10 strategic technology trends are trends that are shifting, changing, reaching key tipping points, and driving disruption. These are the technology trends that you can’t afford to ignore. We’re taking a look at the technology trends around two themes this year, people-centric and smart spaces.

 

1. Hyper automation is the first people-centric trend.

Hyper automation looks at two things number one; an expansion of automation or everything that can be automated will be automated. Second, hyper-automation looks at going from RPA and task-oriented automation to adding much more sophisticated A.I. based process automation and building digital twins to the organization for digital ops. For example, rental car companies are exploring how automated expert systems and assistance can be used to wrench your rental car or perform some other customer service activity.

2. The second trend is multi-experience.

Multi-experience focuses on how people interact with perceive and control the digital world and related applications. You don’t hold the computer in your hand in a multi-experience world. The world is your computer. Domino’s Pizza has invested in a multi Experience Platform. It goes beyond just a mobile application to order pizzas and includes applications that go out to a smart speaker, a pizza tracker application autonomous vehicles for delivery drones for delivery. Many other components to focus on a multi-experience for their customers.

3. Third trend is democratization.

Democratization is about users getting easy access to technology through radically simplified interfaces and expert systems. Think of it as an amateur or a novice getting access to highly developed skills that they were not directly trained for. One example of democratization would be the use of Robo advisers. These expert systems can automatically balance portfolios and provide additional advice on how you invest.

4. Fourth trend is human augmentation.

Human augmentation focuses on how technology is used to enhance the cognitive and physical aspects of the human experience. It exists at the intersection of many other trends, multi-experience to drive better interfaces hyper-automation to automate more and more activities expert systems autonomous things. These all feed into this new human augmented experience.

5. Fifth trend is transparency and traceability.

Digital ethics data privacy explainable A.I. ethical A.I. These are all critical issues, and they are there to try and address the trust crisis that we have today. You need to have transparency into how you use data on how you’re building and training A.I. models and how they’re used and traceability and all ability on what happens with those systems.

6. Sixth trend and the first trend focused on smart spaces is the empowered edge

The edge refers to all of the technologies that are embedded in the Internet of Things and the world around us. The empowered edge looks at how these devices are exploding and forming the foundation for creating smart spaces around us as well. For example, with conversational interfaces, many of these systems today rely on remote cloud-based services. Look for those capabilities to be skinny down so conversational systems can be processed at the edge, not the central cloud.

7. Seventh trend is distributed cloud.

Our distributed cloud trend looks at the next era of cloud where these cloud services don’t simply exist in a remote centralized server but are distributed down into your data center distributed cloud allows you to deal with some of the potential regulatory issues the demands of IO T for lower latency and other challenges of the current centralized cloud model.

8. Eighth trend is autonomous things.

Autonomous things looks at how artificial intelligence and machine learning or enabling greater autonomous actions in physical things looking into the future. Collaborative intelligence is being pioneered with swarm technology by the military that choosing swarms of drones to coordinate battlefields or even being used in attack scenarios.

9. Ninth trend is practical blockchain.

Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger with crypto graphically signed and irrevocable records that can be traced but limitations in that full block chain model are leading to practical block chain solutions using block chain inspired notions focusing primarily on the shared ledger and lightly distributed aspects of block chain supply chain is an increasing use case for block chain. For example, mayors is using raid lands in a blockchain environment to manage shipping manifests and other paperwork as products move through ports and through the shipping channels.

10. Tenth trend is high security.

High security has three key aspects. Number one is securing the A.I. models themselves, and the training data used to support them. Number two is using A.I. to enhance the security tools used to defend the organization. And number three is addressing the new types of attacks where the bad guys are using A.I. to enhance their attack efforts. The bad guys creating phishing attacks are using the technology to gather information and dynamically generate new types of phishing attacks that look scarily like email that came from your brother or your sister or some other trusted entity.

These trends are going to be the foundation for how you build people-centric smart spaces and deliver business value.

Resources:

• https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-10-21-gartner-identifies-the-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020