Embracing the Future: Gartner’s Top 10 Tech Trends for 2023

Hello, dear readers! I recently had the pleasure of watching a fascinating keynote presentation at the Gartner IT Symposium/Expo. The presentation was titled “Gartner’s Top 10 Tech Trends for 2023” and was delivered by David Groombridge, a Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. I was so inspired by the insights shared that I decided to write this blog post to share my thoughts and key takeaways with you.

Introduction

The world is changing rapidly, and the future remains unclear. We’re grappling with ongoing global issues like the war in Ukraine, supply chain disruptions, energy crises, and a looming financial crisis. Amidst all this uncertainty, the question for businesses is: What should we do to make a difference?

Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2023 provide some answers. They are grouped into three key themes: Optimize, Scale, and Pioneer. Each trend represents a set of approaches and technologies that Gartner believes businesses must leverage over the next three years to innovate and thrive amidst disruption. Let’s dive right in!

Optimize: Resilience, Operations, and Trust

Digital Immune System

The first trend is the Digital Immune System. This is a collection of software engineering strategies designed to inoculate your systems against risk. By using observability, automation, and extreme design testing, businesses can mitigate operational and security issues, thereby increasing resilience.

For instance, American Airlines used site reliability engineering, observability, and chaos engineering to increase resilience and protect revenue. Similarly, a Norwegian insurance company, Fremtind, implemented feature toggles to separate the risks of business usage from software deployments.

Applied Observability

The second trend is Applied Observability. This involves using AI to analyze data generated by every decision taken in an enterprise, thereby creating a feedback loop for faster and more effective future decisions.

Cleverness Ship Management, for example, combined operational and engine data with contextual data such as weather and location to produce a business dashboard. This allowed them to immediately detect issues of inefficient engine usage, saving costs in fuel, maintenance, and spare parts.

AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM)

The third trend is AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM). This approach aims to accelerate AI value by detecting and mitigating risks that can affect AI models and data throughout the lifetime of the model.

The Danish Business Authority, for instance, uses AI models to monitor financial transactions worth billions of euros. They tie ethical principles to concrete outcomes, check model predictions against fairness tests, and constantly monitor the ethics of their AI in production, thereby protecting its value.

Scale: Vertically, Pace, and Everywhere

Industry Cloud Platforms

The fourth trend is Industry Cloud Platforms. These platforms provide a portfolio of services spanning software, platform, and infrastructure as a service, delivering composable modules of industry-specific capability to deliver against defined vertical use cases.

Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, for example, used a healthcare cloud platform from a hyperscale provider to rapidly digitalize the business, increasing the productivity of clinical staff.

Platform Engineering

The fifth trend is Platform Engineering. This involves creating an internal development platform with a dedicated team to build and maintain it, thereby reducing inefficiency and accelerating delivery.

The Norwegian Police Force, for instance, implemented an internal developer platform supported by a dedicated team, reducing software deployment times from days to seconds.

Wireless Value Realization

The sixth trend is Wireless Value Realization. This involves managing multiple wireless networks simultaneously and using next-generation capabilities to build intelligent connected infrastructure.

Shufersal, an Israeli retailer, tags produce with

low power IoT chips that can harvest energy directly from the network. This allows them to track goods from the farm directly to the store shelves, improving supply chain visibility, inventory management, and provenance information.

Pioneer: Super App, Adaptive AI, and Metaverse

Super App

The seventh trend is the Super App. These apps combine the features of an app, a platform, and an ecosystem. They provide their own inbuilt functionality and make a development platform available to other organizations to build and publish their own mini apps.

PayPay, a Japanese super app with 50 million users, integrates the purchasing of third-party goods and services and offers external mini apps for ordering groceries, buying cinema tickets, and bicycle sharing, alongside its own financial services apps.

Adaptive AI

The eighth trend is Adaptive AI. This involves using real-time feedback to continuously retrain models in development environments and in the runtime environment based on new data and adjusted goals.

The U.S Army, for instance, uses AI-based training software that applies adaptive teaching that matches individual learning styles, accelerating training by up to 40 percent.

Metaverse

The ninth trend is the Metaverse. This involves investing strategically in the components of the Metaverse that will add value to your business now, while keeping a skeptical eye on the long-term opportunities.

OneRare, an Indian virtual reality startup, aims to offer immersive experiences for food lovers. It offers food-based rewards to gamers and integrates purchases from virtual and physical food outlets using web3, aiming to offer a truly global market to food brands.

Sustainable Technology

The final trend is Sustainable Technology. This involves using technology to reduce material and energy use in IT services, enable enterprise sustainability outcomes, and deliver digital solutions that enable clients to achieve their own sustainability outcomes.

Stora Enso, a Finnish manufacturer of pulp and paper products, uses AI startups to create a satellite image analysis solution to monitor forest health. DeliverFund, a US-based non-profit organization, uses homomorphic encryption to share data securely with other agencies without exposing personal information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2023 provide a roadmap for businesses to navigate the uncertain future. Whether you need to optimize, scale, or pioneer, these trends will help you innovate and make a difference.

Remember, the key to leveraging these trends is to align them with your business objectives and create a specific path to value. This will show when you will innovate with each of these trends to deliver the value that is relevant to your organization.

I hope you found this blog post informative and inspiring. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend watching the full keynote presentation here.

Let’s embrace these trends and together, we can shape a better future!