Among the top 10 technology trends that Gartner predicts for 2023 are cost reduction by optimizing IT, expanding networks to generate value and business growth, and changing the direction of the business itself.
There is growing uncertainty about how to overcome the most recent challenges stemming from supply chain problems, the war in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, the difficulty in finding talent, and the evolution of the financial crisis. To overcome them, some companies will reduce costs, others will continue with existing expansion plans, and some will completely change the direction of their business strategy.
With three central themes (optimizing, scaling, and pioneering), Gartner has predicted 10 key strategic technology trends for 2023 that can help businesses overcome today’s economic and market challenges.
Scaling industry cloud platforms vertically
To scale their business, organizations are adopting vertical market clouds, which a variety of suppliers increasingly offer with industry-specific data sets for different sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain, agriculture, and finance. These days, companies are focused on extracting business value from cloud technology and don’t want to worry about the underlying infrastructure, according to Padraig Byrne, senior analyst director at Gartner.
“What we have seen has been the emergence of industry-specific modular components, dedicated to particular industrial segments that allow companies to quickly create differentiated offerings without fully developing the underlying technology,” Byrne said.
Reducing friction between development teams and complex infrastructure
Once the cloud environment is ready, the urgency of bringing products to market arises, changing the focus on platform engineering to scale delivery.
“But we have complex architectures, or we have hybrid systems and some of the applications on-premises and some in the cloud. We also lack skills: a developer who doesn’t know how to build a scalable network,” Byrne said.
The solution is to look at the difference between where the development team sits and the infrastructure layer and look to reduce friction between the two.
This can be done by creating engineering platforms with reusable components for developers with tools, such as integrated development environments (IDE), monitoring tools, and CI/CD, all delivered in a self-service development portal. These would be pre-tested tools for developers to access when necessary instead of requesting approval to use this or that tool.
Everywhere with Wi-Fi
The wireless trend is based on Gartner’s prediction that by 2025, 60% of businesses will use five or more wireless technologies, which, among other things, means additional use of Wi-Fi in the office.
That prediction is not far-fetched; as Byrne said, consumers are already using up to three wireless technologies a day.
But wireless networks go beyond individual tools. For example, Western Australian mining company Albemarle created a private 5G network that allowed scientists and engineers to access systems remotely when needed rather than having to be on site.
“However, what this means is that your network is not just a cost to the business, but if you think differently, it can become something that adds value or differentiation to what you do,” Byrne said.
Creating digital immune systems
76% of the teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation, according to Gartner. Traditional approaches to software development make it difficult to build scalable, secure, and stable systems, making it challenging to generate revenue.
This is where the concept of digital immunity of the research firm comes into play, as it brings together multiple modern practices around the application development lifecycle, such as observability, to improve what organizations can see, and site reliability engineering and chaos engineering, to improve application resilience., Byrne said. “It gathers analysis and AI to improve the testing of these tools and then covers end-to-end security throughout your supply chain. And what this offers is more resilient applications that will help you avoid interruptions,” he said.
Gartner predicts that companies can reduce downtime by up to 80% by adopting some of these technologies, which translates into revenue.
Observability applied for better operations
The concept of applied observability is not new, but it has implications in the context of optimization and goes hand in hand with practices related to digital immunity. Byrne explained it as collecting data from decisions made, then collecting data on the context in which decisions were made and applying context analysis to create a feedback cycle to make more value-driven decisions.
Managing trust, risk, and security for AI
AI TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management) is, in short, making AI reliable. Even among the most experienced companies, Gartner found that only 50% of AI models ever make it to production and that the reasons behind this are a lack of trust in data and problems with security and privacy.
First, to improve AI adoption, organizations must be able to explain why a computer made a decision. This is accompanied by ModelOps, a Gartner term for governance and lifecycle management of a wide range of decision models and operationalized artificial intelligence, including machine learning, knowledge graphics, rules, optimization, and linguistic and agent-based models. According to Gartner, the result of using ModelOps is that models enter production faster and with less friction.
Then comes advanced techniques like contradictory AI, used to generate one model to train another, “and we see that this is already used in areas like image generation and games like chess,” Byrne said. And finally, ethical guidelines and strong data protection are needed.
“All of this means that these models will have greater confidence and, therefore, it is likely, in the development effort, to become a production environment,” Byrne said.
Start creating super applications
Gartner suggests that companies can pioneer new ways to engage customers by developing super applications. Super applications combine some of the functionality of a standard application with the attributes of an application platform and ecosystem, according to Byrne. Super applications have distinct features and the ability to create third-party applications with a common data model shared between the primary application and third-party software.
Moving forward from the beginning will give businesses an advantage, Byrne said, and he sees opportunities around finance and health, among other verticals.
Adaptive AI to respond to org
anizational change
Once the issues of trust, production, and custom analytics have been resolved, businesses can move to adaptive AI, which uses real-time feedback and adaptive learning algorithms to get a business sense and respond to changing environments.
It allows companies to create and access new data for testing in these environments, as well as the ability to continuously customize the output of algorithms for the user, providing individualized offerings dedicated to users. “This is an adaptive AI, and it’s a very different mindset from traditional AI,” Byrne said.
Metaverse will combine different technologies
For those skeptics of the metaverse, Byrne said it encompasses several different technologies and is related to business issues such as lack of trust in data or how to improve customer service. One way to use it could be through avatars and chatbots to improve customer delivery. Other forms include gamification for training and augmented reality for shopping experiences. Gartner found that 51% of Gen Z expect augmented reality to come true in the next two years.
Technology will play a role in sustainability
Gartner’s main trends conclude with sustainability and the role that IT can play. Byrne warns that it is not only about the environment and climate change but also about the people behind the business, the social aspects of an organization, improving the work culture, diversity, Equity, and inclusion of employees, and improved training.
But technology has a significant role in environmental sustainability, particularly around energy reduction solutions for IT services and renewable energy analysis and traceability. Companies can consider this, define what applies to their business and then work on a roadmap.
“And then he creates his own roadmap and realizes that not all of these technologies should be delivered at once. Once you determine the time frame in which they can be delivered, you can set your own path through this and create your own organization-centered action plan,” Byrne said.
