Brian Burke, research VP for technology innovation, Gartner.

There are ten top strategic technology trends that Gartner is talking about for 2023, divided into three main themes, namely optimise, scale, and pioneer.

The analysts have been presenting these trends for almost 20 years, and each year examine the technologies they believe are going to have the most significant impact on organisations across industries over the next three to five years.

So said Brian Burke, research VP for technology innovation at Gartner, speaking during the first ITWeb Tech Trends webinar held this morning.

“This year, we're looking at a number of technologies that we have grouped in terms of  technologies that are looking to optimise the services that we're delivering; technologies that help us to scale our services to grow and to improve; and finally the technologies that are brand new out of the gate, and that will be used by pioneers in technology,” he says.

The first theme is about optimising IT systems for greater reliability, improving data-driven decision-making, and maintaining the value integrity of AI systems in production. Under this theme, the related trends are digital immune system, applied observability, and AI TRiSM, which stands for AI trust, risk, and security management.

The digital immune system is really about optimising resilience because users expect systems to be available all the time “If we apply technologies like these, we can ensure that we have 80% less downtime.”

Observability is about visibility into the systems in operations to understand how they're performing and then finding ways to optimise that performance. “This is about observing user behaviours and then learning from those behaviours to change the way that we are delivering systems.”

AI-augmented testing means leveraging AI in testing methodologies to improve the way that chaos engineering (the practice of deliberately injecting faults into a system to test its resilience) is tested, and about extending that and creating test cases that are unanticipated to understand the potential impacts to systems.

This leads to AI requiring new forms of trust, risk, and security management that conventional controls don’t provide. AI TRiSM capabilities ensure model reliability, trustworthiness, security, and privacy, and fuels better outcomes in terms of AI adoption, achieved business goals, and user acceptance, he explains.

The next theme is 'scale' which is about accelerating vertical offerings, increasing the pace of product delivery, and enabling connectivity everywhere. Here the related trends are industry cloud platforms, platform engineering, and wireless-value realisation

Firstly, industry cloud platforms enable us to scale vertically. The three most powerful platforms, and in fact most cloud platforms right now, deliver horizontal services. These services are cross-industry and basically usable by virtually every organisation.

What an industry cloud platform does is provide industry-specific applications and package business capabilities to start to cobble together applications using a composable application platform so that we can drive the vertical applications that are unique to the industry, he explains.

When it comes to platform engineering, Burke says we’re shifting towards a stage where the underlying infrastructure is tremendously complex and hybrid, and there are business technologists who are developing IT solutions using low code, and no code applications, as well as doing a lot around analytics.

“Platform engineering allows us to scale delivery so that we can make these services available not only to business technologists but to IT developers as well within the IT organisation.”

Next, we have wireless value realisation. While most people understand wireless, they don’t think about certain wireless technologies such as 5G, Bluetooth, extended Zigbee and ultra high frequency network technologies.

“The network is capable of doing a lot more than just connecting devices. When the network emits radio waves, we can use that to determine location. We can use that to power devices by harvesting energy from the environment.”

The final theme is about pioneering, which enables business model changes, reinvents engagement with employees and customers, and accelerates strategies to tap new virtual markets. Under this grouping, we’d find super apps, adaptive AI, and the metaverse.

Super apps are applications that we're seeing that are evolving primarily in the east, many out of China. WeChat and AliPay, for example, where the app itself provides the core features. “We also have a platform where many apps are developed by third parties and are then published on that platform and leveraged by individual users.”

In a nutshell, super apps are starting to be apps that are providing an overall platform for engagement for individuals and organisations.

Next, is adaptive AI. He says most of the artificial intelligence models that are being developed, and deployed, and fed a lot of data which they can learn from. They are static, they don't change in production. This is why we are starting to move towards is adaptive AI, which is a goal-oriented model that seeks to achieve a goal in terms of the performance of the model by leveraging real-time feedback. In this way, the model evolves in real-time, which enables it to adapt to changing situations, and improve over time, Burke adds.

Finally, the concept of a metaverse is not new, but has started to gain traction when Facebook changed its name to Meta, and refocused on being a metaverse platform provider, adds Burke.

We are seeing entities now developing ways to provide better engagement, collaboration, and connection to their workforces through virtual workspaces and the use of internal metaverse experiences called Intraverses.

Metaverse technologies enable individuals to replicate or enhance their physical activities, by transporting or extending them to a virtual world or by transforming the physical one, he ends.