In an era where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and garnering significant attention, understanding related technology trends becomes a crucial factor in creating a competitive edge in business, as well as assisting entrepreneurs and executives in prioritizing investments effectively.

 

For this reason, G-Able, as a Tech Enabler with over 34 years of experience in providing comprehensive IT and Digital solutions services, places immense importance on researching technology trends relevant to business. Consequently, this article focuses on the 10 strategic technology trends of 2024 that Gartner predicts will have an impact in the next three years. We are confident that this exploration and research will enable entrepreneurs and executives to steer their businesses towards success in the era of AI and Marketing 6.0, with smart and sustainable long-term decisions

 

10 Strategic Technology Trends 2024

 

 

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

Supports AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, transparency and data protection.

 

Why Trending?

• Those who actively use AI TRiSM controls move more of their AI projects into production, achieve more business value, and experience enhanced model precision and consistency, than those who don’t.
• Organizations that use AI models managed with TRiSM can enhance bias control in decisions while increasing fairness in AI-driven applications.
• AI model explainability must be constantly tested through model monitoring. This ensures that original explanations and interpretations of AI models remain active during model operations.

Gartner Predicts: By 2026, enterprises that apply TRiSM controls to AI applications will increase accuracy of their decision making by eliminating 80% of faulty and illegitimate information.

 

 

2. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

A pragmatic and systemic approach to continuously adjust cybersecurity optimization priorities.

 

Why Trending?

• This approach to security aligns exposure assessment cycles with specific business projects or critical threat vectors.
• Both patchable (vulnerabilities) and unpatchable exposures are addressed.
• The exposure and remediation priorities of the enterprise are validated by weighing in the attacker’s view and testing the effectiveness of security controls.
• Expected outcomes from tactical and technical response are shifted to evidence-based security optimizations supported by improved cross-team mobilization.

Gartner Predicts: By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a CTEM program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches.

 

 

3. Sustainable Technology

A framework of digital solutions used to enable environmental, social and governance (ESG) outcomes that support long-term ecological balance and human rights.

 

Why Trending?

• Environmental technologies prevent, mitigate and adapt to risks in the natural world.
• Social technologies improve human rights outcomes, well-being and prosperity.
• Governance technologies strengthen business conduct, oversight and capacity building.
• Sustainable technologies provide insights necessary for improving overall performance

Gartner Predicts: By 2027, 25% of CIOs will have compensation linked to their sustainable technology impact.

 

 

4. Platform Engineering

The discipline of building and operating self-service internal platforms — each platform is a layer, created and maintained by a dedicated product team, designed to support the needs of its users by interfacing with tools and processes.

 

Why Trending?

• This practice optimizes the developer experience and accelerates delivery of business value.
• It reduces cognitive load through improvement of the developer experience and productivity.
• Developers’ abilities to independently run, manage and develop their applications is improved, while ensuring reliability and security.
• Key talent retention is also improved.

Gartner Predicts: By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

 

 

5. AI-Augmented Development

The use of AI technologies, such as generative AI and machine learning (ML), to aid software engineers in creating, testing and delivering applications.

 

Why Trending?

• AI-augmented development tools integrate with an engineer’s development environment to produce application code, translate legacy code to modern languages, enable design-to-code transformation and enhance application testing capabilities.
• AI-assisted software engineering improves developer productivity and enables development teams to address this increasing demand for software to run the business.
• AI-infused development tools allow software engineers to spend less time writing code, facilitating an increased focus on higher level activities, such as the design and composition of compelling business applications.

Gartner Predicts: By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023.

 

 

6. Industry Cloud Platforms

Address industry-relevant business outcomes by combining underlying SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services into a whole product offering with composable capabilities.

 

Why Trending?

• Industry cloud platforms (ICPs) are tailored cloud proposals specific to your industry and can further be tailored to your individual organization’s needs.
• IT leaders can use the composability of these platforms to gain the adaptability and agility to respond to accelerating disruption in their organization’s industry.
• ICPs deliver on industry-specific outcomes that are relevant to the mission-critical priorities of the vertical segment.
• Technology and IT leaders can use the composable approach that ICPs take toward creating industrywide capabilities by (re)composing a differentiating proposition, which is unique for their customer and partner ecosystem.

Gartner Predicts: By 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023.

 

 

7. Intelligent Applications

Consumer or business applications that are augmented with AI and various connected data from transactions and external sources.

 

Why Trending?

• Generative AI can truly make apps more intelligent — transforming the experience of customers, users, product owners, architects and developers.
• Infused with data from transactions and external sources, intelligent applications push insights within apps business users already use, so they won’t need separate business intelligence tools to assess and understand the state of their business.
• AI can add predictions or recommendations, instead of more procedural features, allowing apps to be tailored to the user, improving outcomes and advancing data-driven decision making.

Gartner Predicts: By 2026, 30% of new apps will use AI to drive personalized adaptive user interfaces, up from under 5% today.

 

 

8. Democratized Generative AI

The ability to create net new content (images, speech, text and more) and its widespread availability will democratize access to information and skills, making it one of the most disruptive trends of this decade.

 

Why Trending?

• Democratizing access to generative AI across the organization offers the potential to automate a broad range of tasks, boosting productivity, reducing costs and offering new opportunities for growth.
• It has the ability to transform the way virtually all enterprises compete and do work.
• Democratization of information and skills across a broad set of roles and business functions will follow.
• Vast sources of information — both internal and external — can be made accessible and available to business users via natural language conversational interfaces.

Gartner Predicts: By 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs, models and/or deployed generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, an increase from fewer than 5% today.

 

 

9. Augmented Connected Workforce

A strategy to optimize the value delivered by human staff by establishing a connective tissue that optimizes use of intelligent technology, workforce analytics and skill augmentation to accelerate and scale talent building.

 

Why Trending?

• This strategy accelerates new (digital) skills required for work — across all job types.
• It provides the opportunity for digital tools to reduce time to competency for new hires.
• Smarter work will be made possible through advancements in workplace automation and AI, requiring the workforce to be increasingly able to manage complex issues.

Gartner Predicts: Through 2027, 25% of CIOs will use augmented connected workforce initiatives to reduce time to competency by 50% for key roles.

 

 

10. Machine Customers

Nonhuman economic actors that purchase goods and services in exchange for payment.

 

Why Trending?

• For the first time in human history, companies will be able to make their own customers.
• By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years.
• They will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030 and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce.

Gartner Predicts: By 2028, machine customers will render 20% of human-readable digital storefronts obsolete.

 

 

3 Theme Strategic Technology Trends

 

From the above infographic, it is evident that each trend is interrelated, linking at least one other topic. The selection and timing of capitalizing on any given trend depend on the individual business objectives of each organization. Gartner has categorized all the trends into three themes and provided the following recommendations for getting started.

 

 

Theme 1: Protect your investment

Secure the benefits from past and future strategic technology decisions to make them last.

 

What to DO

• Be deliberate — the time for unbridled/undirected experimentation is no more.
• Include investment in protective measures when calculating perceived ROI.
• Tailor developments with distribution in mind while securing your rights.

 

In Action: AI TRism

Fidelity Investments deployed hundreds of AI models through a model operations framework. It followed detailed control steps to consistently monitor deployments for potential problems, such as drift, enabling Fidelity to respond to them before the need for escalation. As a result, Fidelity increased model-to-production speed by 100% and reduced the time to find and resolve issues by 80% (cutting it from weeks to hours).

 

 

Theme 2: Rise of the builders

Empower your people and developers to build solutions using the right technology for each function.

 

What to DO

• Use technology benefitting YOU (and your specialists).
• Develop a roadmap for allowing nonspecialists to create, as well.
• Work closely with business stakeholders to determine scope and capability.

 

In Action: Platform Engineering

BP has enabled its employees to create their own solutions with limited involvement from IT. BP developed a broad portfolio of digital platforms to match its users’ capabilities and needs. It automated security testing, component scanning and licensing, and release automation.

 

 

Theme 3: Deliver the value

Commit to a cycle of refining and accelerating value optimization while maintaining operational excellence.

 

What to DO

• Make continuous adjustments to meet internal and external customer demand, which makes this a virtuous cycle.
• Include approaches for algorithm-based customers and your internal staff.
• Facilitate controlled access to quickly changing digital tools.

 

In Action: Augmented Connected Workforce

Merck has a dedicated program for extended reality designed to maximize the use of employee time. The program was developed with HR and L&D partners, business unit leads and operations. Frontline workers champion use cases across knowledge transfer, testing and training. Each manufacturing site is provided with templates to guide deployment and change management. As a result, 70% of subject matter expert time was redirected from non-value-added work, and an average of two weeks was saved on training and time to competence.

 

 

Summary 

 

In conclusion, Gartner recommends that after organizations are informed about these 10 trends, they should promptly assess the impacts and benefits of each type of technology to consider which innovations or integration strategies will have the most significant effect on the success of your organization moving forward.