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Here come the 'custobots': AI pervades Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2024

Gartner has identified the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2024, and generative and other types of AI solutions take center stage with widespread adoption and risks that are primary focus areas.

The top strategic technology trends for 2024 are:

1. Democratized generative AI

Generative AI (aka, GenAI) is becoming democratized by the confluence of massively pre-trained models, cloud computing, and open source -- making these models accessible to workers worldwide.

Also: Two breakthroughs made 2023 tech's most innovative year in over a decade

By 2026, Gartner predicts, over 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.

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

The democratization of access to AI has made the need for AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (TRiSM) more clear and urgent. Without guardrails, AI models can rapidly generate compounding negative effects that spin out of control, overshadowing any positive performance and societal gains that AI enables.

AI TRiSM provides tooling for ModelOps, proactive data protection, AI-specific security, model monitoring (including monitoring for data drift, model drift, and/or unintended outcomes), and risk controls for inputs and outputs to third-party models and applications. Gartner predicts that by 2026, enterprises that apply AI TRiSM controls will increase the accuracy of their decision-making by eliminating up to 80% of faulty and illegitimate information.

3. AI-augmented development

AI-augmented development is the use of AI technologies, such as GenAI and machine learning, to aid software engineers in designing, coding, and testing applications. AI-assisted software engineering improves developer productivity and enables development teams to address the increasing demand for software to run the business.

Also: AI in 2023: A year of breakthroughs that left no human thing unchanged

These AI-infused development tools enable software engineers to spend less time writing code, so they can spend more time on strategic activities such as the design and composition of compelling business applications.

4. Intelligent applications

Intelligent applications include intelligence -- which Gartner defines as learned adaptation to respond appropriately and autonomously -- as a capability. This intelligence can be utilized in many use cases to better augment or automate work. As a foundational capability, intelligence in applications comprises various AI-based services, such as machine learning, vector stores, and connected data. Consequently, intelligent applications deliver experiences that dynamically adapt to the user.

Gartner: top 3 critical enterprise outcomes for CIOs and tech executives are: 1. Customer experience excellence 2. Operating margin improvement 3. Revenue generation pic.twitter.com/7ILijA8pia — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 16, 2023

5. Augmented-connected workforce

The augmented-connected workforce (ACWF) is a strategy for optimizing the value derived from human workers. The need to accelerate and scale talent is driving the ACWF trend. The ACWF uses intelligent applications and workforce analytics to provide everyday context and guidance to support the workforce's experience, well-being, and ability to develop its own skills.

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At the same time, the ACWF drives business results and positive impact for key stakeholders. Through 2027, 25% of CIOs will use ACWF initiatives to reduce time to competency by 50% for key roles.

6. Continuous threat exposure management

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a pragmatic and systemic approach that allows organizations to evaluate the accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of an enterprise's digital and physical assets continually and consistently. Aligning CTEM assessment and remediation scopes with threat vectors or business projects, rather than an infrastructure component, surfaces not only the vulnerabilities but also the unpatchable threats. By 2026, Gartner predicts that organizations prioritizing their security investments based on a CTEM program will realize a two-thirds reduction in breaches.

How AI powered customers will evolve pic.twitter.com/6YZv4ov4uU — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 16, 2023

7. Machine customers or 'custobots'

Machine customers (also called "custobots") are nonhuman economic actors that can autonomously negotiate and purchase goods and services in exchange for payment. By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years. This growth trend will be the source of trillions of dollars in revenues by 2030 and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce. Strategic considerations should include opportunities to either facilitate these algorithms and devices, or even create new custobots.

8. Sustainable technology

Sustainable technology is a framework of digital solutions used to enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes that support long-term ecological balance and human rights. The use of technologies such as AI, cryptocurrency, the Internet of Things and cloud computing is driving concern about the related energy consumption and environmental impacts.

Also: Tech for a sustainable future: The challenges and opportunities ahead

This makes it more critical to ensure that the use of IT becomes more efficient, circular, and sustainable. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, 25% of CIOs will see their personal compensation linked to their sustainable technology impact.

9. Platform engineering

Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal development 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. The goal of platform engineering is to optimize productivity and the user experience, and to accelerate the delivery of business value.

10. Industry cloud platforms

By 2027, Gartner predicts, more than 70% of enterprises will use Industry cloud platforms (ICPs) to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023. ICPs address industry-relevant business outcomes by combining underlying SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services into a whole product offering with composable capabilities. These typically include an industry data fabric, a library of packaged business capabilities, composition tools, and other platform innovations. ICPs are tailored cloud proposals specific to an industry and can further be tailored to an organization's needs.

Also: If AI is the future of your business, should the CIO be the one in control?

In addition to the top technology strategic trends, Gartner also provided its top strategic IT predictions, exploring how GenAI has changed executive leaders' way of thinking on every subject and how to create a more flexible and adaptable organization that is better prepared for the future. Here are Gartner's top 10 strategic predictions :

By 2027, the productivity value of AI will be recognized as a primary economic indicator of national power.
By 2027, GenAI tools will be used to explain legacy business applications and create appropriate replacements, reducing modernization costs by 70%.
By 2028, enterprise spending on battling malinformation will surpass $30 billion, cannibalizing 10% of marketing and cybersecurity budgets to combat a multifront threat.
By 2027, 45% of chief information security officers (CISOs) will expand their remit beyond cybersecurity, due to increasing regulatory pressure and attack surface expansion.
By 2028, the rate of unionization among knowledge workers will increase by 1,000%, motivated by the adoption of GenAI.
In 2026, 30% of workers will leverage digital charisma filters to achieve previously unattainable advances in their careers.
By 2027, 25% of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodivergent talent across conditions like autism, ADHD, and dyslexia to improve business performance.
By 2028, there will be more smart robots than frontline workers in manufacturing, retail, and logistics due to labor shortages.
By 2026, 50% of G20 members will experience monthly electricity rationing, turning energy-aware operations into either a competitive advantage or a major failure risk.
By 2026, generative AI will significantly alter 70% of the design and development effort for new web applications and mobile apps.

Another example of the impact of AI in business is the use for sales professionals. By 2025, 35% of chief revenue officers will resource a centralized "GenAI Operations" team as part of their go-to-market organization. As adoption accelerates, sales enablement leaders can drive responsible use of the technology to help achieve better sales outcomes.

Sample areas of AI's impact on Sales.

Research from Salesforce's annual State of IT report confirms many of the projections from Gartner. Many other independent research reports validate the accelerated adoption of AI, including generative AI. According to McKinsey , 50% of organizations used AI in 2022. IDC is forecasting global AI spending to increase by a staggering 26.9% in 2023 alone.

Also: What technology analysts are saying about the future of generative AI

A recent survey of customer service professionals found adoption of AI had risen by 88% between 2020 and 2022. Customer service leads AI use cases with organizations with AI using it in the following ways: Service operations optimization (24%), new AI-based products (20%), customer service analytics (19%), customer segmentation (19%), AI-based product enhancements (19%), customer acquisition and lead generation (17%), contact center automation (16%), and product feature optimizations (16%).

2023 STATE OF IT REPORT 20 key IT statistics and trends found that every CIO should know: 1. 84% of IT leaders say their departments need to better address changing customer expectations. 2. 82% of IT leaders say their departments need to better demonstrate business… — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) September 12, 2023

The State of IT report found that generative AI has only recently become mainstream. The report shows 86% of IT leaders believe generative AI will have a prominent role in their organizations in the near future. Yet 64% of IT leaders are concerned about the ethics of generative AI, and 62% are concerned about its impacts on their careers. The report also notes that ethics and generative AI focus on accuracy, bias, toxicity, safety, and privacy.

Also: The ethics of generative AI: How we can harness this powerful technology

In a recent survey of IT leaders, concerns around generative AI included security risks (79%), bias (73%), and carbon footprint (71%). With nearly 9 out of 10 IT leaders believing generative AI will have a prominent role in their organizations in the near future, business leaders must understand the strategic technology trends highlighted by Gartner for 2024 and beyond. In order to do this, businesses must commit to education, stakeholder reskilling, and strategic partnerships in order to ready themselves for a future that is led by AI-powered products and services.

Artificial Intelligence

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Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Report from Gartner®

Gartner research explores opportunities for leaders to look beyond reducing costs to new forms of operational efficiency. With advancements in technology and a shift toward a hybrid work culture, all leaders have the opportunity to accelerate digital transformation. These advancements come alongside increased focus on environmental impact.

Gartner research investigates ten strategic technology trends and recommends actions to address these.

The report findings examine:

1. Optimize: Digital Immune System

“Many IT organizations can’t fulfill the expectations of the business because teams lack the skills to:

Build robust and resilient applications
Deal with unexpected failures or events
Deliver value faster than they create technical debt

This exposes organizations to operational and business risks when applications and products or services that depend on them are severely compromised, or stop working altogether. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to mitigate these risks, deliver high business value and increase customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

The digital immune system approach includes practices and technologies for software design, development, automation, operation and analytics. It uses these to create a superior customer and user experience that won’t be compromised by defects or system failures that impact business performance. Digital immune systems interlink practices from the areas of observability, software testing, chaos engineering, site reliability engineering and supply chain security of applications.”

2. Optimize: Applied Observability

“Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts (sometimes called the footprints, traces or “exhaust” that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action). Examples of observable “raw data” (or digital artifacts) include logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers. Applied observability uses these observable artifacts in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to enable decision making in a new way across many levels of the organization — mainly on functional, application and infrastructure levels.

The value of applied observability comes from the fact that the data is all sourced from confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions, obligations or promises. It’s not a forecast or prediction. The observable data is cataloged, engineered and layered with semantic understanding, which results in both active and passive metadata. The architected use of this metadata drives better, faster and more effective business and IT decisions.”

3. Optimize: AI Trust, Risk and Security Management

“A Gartner survey found that organizations that actively managed AI risk, privacy and security achieved improved AI project results. More of their AI projects moved from proof of concept status into production and achieved more business value than did AI projects in organizations that didn’t actively manage these functions.

Conventional data and application security best practices are foundational and mandatory, but don’t address the new trust, risk, privacy, and security management issues that AI raises. AI regulations are proliferating worldwide, mandating auditable practices that ensure trust, transparency, and customer protection.

Organizations must implement new capabilities to ensure model reliability, trustworthiness, security, and data protection. AI trust, risk and security management requires participants from different units, (e.g., AI, security, compliance, and operations) to work together to implement new measures.”

4. Scale: Industry Cloud Platforms

“Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of Software as a Service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — along with tailored, industry-specific functionality to address specific vertical requirements. Industry cloud platforms use modularity and composability to offer the agility that industries need to respond to continuous disruptions.

Industry cloud platforms elevate the conversation between cloud consumers and cloud providers from cloud technology to specific industry business use cases. They do so not as predefined, one-off, vertical SaaS solutions, but rather as agile platforms supported by a portfolio of industry-specific packaged business capabilities. In effect, they turn a cloud platform into a business platform and expand a technology innovation tool into one that also serves as a business innovation tool.

Industry clouds use composable modularity to assemble vertical propositions that offer:

More adaptability than most of today’s SaaS applications
More industry-specific business functionality in the form of reusable business capabilities, empowering faster innovation and accelerating time to value
More potential to use innovation in one industry for building cross-industry solutions”

5. Scale: Platform Engineering

“Product teams spend an inordinate amount of time and effort designing, building and maintaining operational development environments. This affects productivity and often leads to redundancy when different product teams — working in isolation independently — build similar capabilities. Moreover, software developers aren’t often experts in the services that underlie the applications, so they can’t manage those services effectively.

Platform engineering empowers product teams by providing a self-service, curated set of tools, capabilities and processes that together offer a frictionless experience for developers. The platform should include everything that the developer needs, and present it in whatever manner fits best with the developer’s workflow established for the software engineering organization.”

6. Scale: Wireless Value Realization

“Realizing value from wireless technologies extends beyond traditional communications. While no single wireless technology will dominate, wireless technologies will be used in new ways. Wireless endpoints will be able to sense, e-charge, locate and track people and things beyond the traditional endpoint communication capabilities. The roadmaps for the five key wireless technologies include new capabilities in areas, such as location tracking, energy harvesting and sensing.

This innovation is being driven not only by new applications, but also organizational changes, as responsibility for enterprise networks continues to converge. In the 2021 Gartner IT/OT Alignment and Integration survey, over 75% of surveyed business and technology leaders (including managers) said that CIOs were responsible for IT and operational technology decisions.15 Facility management assets, such as cyber-physical systems, are continuing to converge with IT and are being added to the IT infrastructure.”

7. Pioneer: Superapps

“A superapp is an app that provides customers, partners or employees with a set of core features and access to independently created miniapps. A superapp is more than just a composite mobile app or a web portal and marketplace. It’s a platform for delivering a composable miniapps ecosystem. Superapps enable the user to activate the micro/miniapp within it, not from a separate app catalog, such as AppExchange. This enables users to activate personalized app experiences.

“Organizations can create superapps to consolidate multiple mobile apps or related services to reduce friction in the user experience, such as context switching, and development effort. Superapps can help achieve economies of scale and exploit the network effect of a larger user base and multiple providers. They can provide a more engaging experience for customers, partners and employees.”

8. Pioneer: Adaptive AI

“Flexibility and adaptability are vital. Reengineering systems has significant impacts on employees, businesses and technology partners. Improving engineering capabilities to increase resilience to change is a continuous process for any organization. Using adaptive AI can be a critical success factor in realizing organizational agility. For many organizations, these changes demand resilience-by-design and adaptive-by-definition.

Adaptive AI systems continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments, based on applying graph analytics. This enables AI models, and the applications relying on them, to adapt more quickly to changes in new, real-world circumstances that weren’t foreseen during development.”

9. Pioneer: Metaverse

“Gartner defines a metaverse as “a collective virtual 3D shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. A metaverse is persistent, providing enhanced immersive experiences.” Gartner expects that a complete metaverse will be device-independent and won’t be owned by a single vendor: It will have a virtual economy of itself, enabled by digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Three characteristics make up a complete metaverse:

Transport: The ability to become immersed in a virtual world. That world may be a 3D simulation and/or in virtual reality.
Transform: The act of bringing digital to the physical world. This enables the user to access real-time information, collaboration, and experiences in the physical world through augmented reality (AR) capabilities.
Transact: The economic foundation of the metaverse through the use of cryptocurrency, NFTs and blockchain.”

10. Underpinning: Sustainable Technology

“To enhance sustainability, organizations need a new sustainable technology framework. IT leaders and other executives must:

Make IT more sustainable
Use IT to help the enterprise become more sustainable
Use IT to help customers become more sustainable

Sustainable technology is a framework of solutions that enable ESG outcomes:

Environmental technologies: These mitigate and adapt to risks in the natural world.
Social technologies: These increase human well-being and prosperity.
Governance technologies: These strengthen the rule of law, business conduct and capacity building.”

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from the Gartner website. Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023, Gilbert van der Heiden, David Groombridge, Bart Willemsen, Arun Chandrasekaran, 17 October 2022

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