Gartner’s ranking of the top 10 strategic technology trends of 2018 suggests a focus on “Intelligent Digital Mesh”
At the end-of-year Symposium, held recently in Orlando, Florida, Gartner, the American IT research and analytics company, released its vision for the technological trends to be monitored and tested in 2018.
Usually, Gartner speaks of strategic trends from a strictly business point of view, meaning all those technologies that will have high disruptive potential over the next five years.
While some technologies, traversing the entire digital ecosystem, remain firmly to the fore, such as Apps, Analytics, the Internet of Things and the Cloud, where new paradigms like Blockchain intersect, others are cornerstones for a new generation of digital based business models:
- Artificial Intelligence and advanced Machine Learning;
- Immersive Experience through Mixed Reality;
- Digital Twins, that is, the digital representation of a physical object to facilitate its analysis;
- Adaptive Security.
“Intelligent Digital Mesh”: here’s how technology will be incorporated into the digital business of the future
The continuous evolution of business activities exploits new models that increasingly tend to merge physical and digital worlds with widespread embedded technology in a network of objects, people, and services: a mesh that represents a real springboard for launching new digital business models.
In this regard, through an in-depth analysis of the current major tech trends, Gartner highlights the top 10 strategic technologies that, starting from 2018, will pave the way for the most innovative companies. The American analytics company merges these trends into three macro categories — Intelligent, Digital and Mesh — to show how new digital models are increasingly enabled by technology platforms where the convergence of things and people, between physical and virtual worlds, is supported by a rich set of intelligent services. In particular:
- “Intelligent” indicates how Artificial Intelligence is penetrating almost all technological and business platforms and how, with a clear and defined focus, it can enable more dynamic, flexible and potentially autonomous systems;
- “Digital” which is not limited to the classical concept of digital but includes the interweaving of virtual and real worlds with the aim of creating immersive and digitized environments capable of having concrete effects on the real experience of people, but also of the business of the company, understood as competitiveness results;
- “Mesh” becomes the weave element. Mesh is the utmost expression of how dynamic connections between people, activities, devices, applications, content, events, and services occur, and that represent the value of digital business, while supporting smart digital ecosystems. In this area, Gartner places technologies that will allow the physical and virtual world to converge.
Top trends of the first category: #1 Intelligent
1 Artificial Intelligence Foundation
The real and widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support decisions, ecosystems, business models, and customer relationships will only be visible in a few years but Gartner estimates that between 2018 and 2025 there will be highly profitable initiatives to be found.
2018 is the year of preparation for the use of artificial intelligence as it will greatly improve many intersecting dynamics in different areas, facilitating decision-making, giving the customer a more enjoyable user experience and bringing about a rethink of their business models.
According to estimates from the American firm, 59% of companies are actively proceeding in order to develop their own AI strategy, while the remaining 41% have already moved into pilot projects or practical experiments.
In addition, by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include Artificial Intelligence in the top five investment priorities and from 2018, companies will invest in data preparation , in system integration, in algorithms and in the selection of training methods and the creation of reference models.
2 Intelligent App and Analytics
Artificial Intelligence is now the battlefield where developers of applications and services will face challenges in the coming years to become competitive on the market. In essence, in the next five years, there can be no application or service that does not integrate, at various levels, at least one AI functionality.
According to Gartner estimates, companies will be interested in augmented and advanced analytics solutions, automated learning systems (especially for automating data preparation phases), Insights sharing solutions as areas of growing strategic importance (in particular as an element for open innovation and for accelerating decision-making).
3 Intelligent things
In Gartner’s view, while on the IoT (Internet of Things) front things are moving quickly, the integration of Artificial Intelligence into objects takes some time. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon be the technologies of reference that will allow and simplify the fluid and natural interaction between machines, humans, and objects.
As the IoT grows by making objects smart through a minimal connection and level of intelligence to perform data analysis and activate actions/reactions, AI and Machine Learning will be the technological elements that allow things to stand-alone or be semi-autonomous (they will then be able to act on their own through understanding and reasoning) and that will allow these objects to work together for a common goal.
Tech trends of the second category: # 2 Digital
4 Digital twins
For “Digital twins” Gartner means a virtual representation of a product or system that receives and uses, thanks to sensors, information gathered from its real twin.
These representations are already in use in the IoT market, especially in design, repair services, or maintenance operations where the “digital twin” facilitates and accelerates this type of business/service. For example, they show a digital representation of a spare part to be replaced in a production machine, allowing operators to do all the relevant simulations before designing, printing in 3D or developing the spare part, thus avoiding the waste of time and resources.
Gartner estimates that from 2018, this type of technology will be more widespread even in more delicate areas such as:
- in medicine: by analysing biometric data or representing the organs of human beings due for transplant;
- in public security or benefit situations: leveraging digital twins in cities to help architects and urban designers design more comfortable and better served urban environments.
5 Cloud to the edge
Edge (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution) or Edge Computing — an increasingly important component of IoT infrastructures — is an ICT resource positioned and activated close to the end user or data source, in the case of the Internet of Things and allows you to increase and speed up your system’s capacity.
The ability to compute and analyse will increasingly draw nearer “intelligent objects” to allow drones, robots, self-guided cars, and sensory machinery not only to transmit information over the cloud, but also to use it — through direct data analysis — to carry out actions autonomously and make real-time decisions.
The cloud is obviously the infrastructure base of reference but with edge computing it will tend to lighten the network by delivering only the information really needed.
6 Conversational platform
Conversational systems are completely changing the way people interact and enjoy digital services. New business systems will be based on this kind of technology that will allow users, for example, to use a computer, tablet or smartphone and access digital services no longer having to learn to use the operating system and programs but interacting with objects and services integrated within them through the common natural language.
Over the next few years, software development will go from designing interfaces to the creation of conversational systems that will be the basis of human-machine interaction.
7 Immersive Experience (Mixed Reality)
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are changing the way people perceive and interact with both the digital world and the physical/real world. The boundaries between the virtual world and the physical world are becoming more and more blurred, so much so that we tend to speak of the real world as a net contrast to the digital one.
In this context, the concept of Mixed Reality has already spread: VR and AR, combined with IoT, Artificial Intelligence applications and services, conversational platforms will already change, beginning in 2018, the way to access and enjoy visible information with a ubiquitous and immersive experience in all contexts.
The two areas that will see the emergence of captivating digital services are:
- Retail, offering a more personalized shopping experience tailored to the needs and habits of the customer. In this sense, AR and VR technologies have completely transformed shopping habits, online and in store, building a new Mixed Reality experience.
- Sport, one of the areas of most impact for Mixed Reality, and in which AR and VR play a decisive role for sports organizations, allowing respectively to enrich the home-based enthusiasts’ experience and improve the experience of fans at the stadium.
Strategic technologies of the third category: # 3 Mesh
8 Blockchain
In the top ten of technology trends in 2018, Blockchain is certainly present, even though Gartner analysts warn that the next two years for businesses will be more explorative than actual testing.
In fact, although the interest is high and potential is enormous, it is necessary first to avoid mistakenly associating Blockchain with bitcoins and cryptic currencies. The next two years will be the decisive ones for companies to get a clear picture of technological operation and its use in new business models, not just for business transactions.
9 Event-driven
According to Gartner, companies will have to make more effort to create digital business models focusing not only on data and information, but above all event-driven.
By 2020, the ability to understand events, that is, the ability to recognize real-time situations will be a compulsory feature of 80% of digital solutions, and most business ecosystems will require the intelligent processing of events.
The reach of these technologies is perceived when thinking, for example, of contextual marketing-enabled services such as geolocation, analysis and facial recognition, digital payments that denote not a single action but one or more events that occur with reference to a site, a person or a community.
10 Adaptive Security
Finally, for those concerned with security, 2018 will be the decisive year to face new threats through sophisticated technologies that incorporate advanced analysis capabilities with Artificial Intelligence into increasingly intelligent and adaptive systems to enable responses and actions in real time.
The adoption of high performance security systems that can reduce hacker attacks becomes a pressing requirement for many companies. For example, the strategic approach called CARTA (Continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment) allows you to identify an attack that is taking place and to intervene in a timely manner.
Artificial Intelligence, the common thread of all upcoming trends
By 2020, Artificial Intelligence will be one of the technologies having most impact on the market by enabling new opportunities in cross-cutting areas: just think of the disruptive effects of mixed reality, facial recognition and self-learning that help develop new scenarios where user experience is at the centre and becomes more and more immersive.
AI, which will be the backdrop to all 2018 technology trends from Gartner, will allow many business environments to record a strong acceleration: the digital dimension allows companies to rethink their strategy and forge even stronger relationships that are interwoven with customers, other companies and related objects, building a mesh, intelligent and digital.
