“Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023”: My 3 insights from Gartner eBook.

Today, the international context and issues at stake in terms of geopolitics, economics, health, as well as environmental, social and governance aspects, are creating uncertainty for companies. Indeed, organizations are facing well-founded concerns that make them re-evaluate and reconsider the relevance of their business strategies in this changing context.

This Gartner's study helps to understand technology trends that are likely to be most relevant so companies can set up priority strategies.

Companies see their energy supply conditions become risky and they see their bills exploding. They are undergoing the impact of growing with more complex regulatory obligations. That is why they need to? support their customers and employees wondering what the future will bring.

At the same time, they must drive the evolution of their business model in line with the environmental needs. They must adapt their corporate strategy to fit the constant progress of technology in the current digital transformation stream. Finally, they must innovate at a faster pace to anticipate market changes to be ready for future opportunities. Organizations need to act instead of operating in reaction mode to the upheavals that occur.

Ambitious strategic goals such as increasing revenue or accelerating digital business require action, even when the future is uncertain. Technology is critical to success, so companies want to map out their plan of action. This is where “Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023” might help.

Through its study, Gartner wants to clarify the technological priorities of companies by providing an annual list of the main technological trends that business leaders and technologists should exploit over the next 36 months, whatever their business needs.

My 3 insights

Among the 10 trends that Gartner details, 3 of them particularly caught my attention : Adaptive AI, Metaverse, Sustainable Technology. According to the research and consultancy company, these technology trends are likely to accelerate over the next three years.

“By 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.” - Gartner

1 - Adaptive AI

Adaptive AI can revise its own code in order to react to changes that may occur as a result of their interaction with the real world, which were not anticipated at the time when the code was written. In the field of conversational AI for example, AI-driven chatbots operate continuous loops. It improves their conversational abilities, so the way they interact with people gets more and more smooth and tends to fit with human expectations.

Adaptive AI solutions are models that automatically update themselves. These updates occur over time as the data ecosystem that feeds them evolves.?These solutions require real-time meta-learning algorithms that can be enforced to produce a continuous learning process. It leads to maintaining and even optimizing capabilities to predict and control? the system when operating in an evolving environment.

The potential of this type of model is clear, as opposed to static models that quickly become obsolete when user behavior changes, when the market evolves or when the economy fluctuates.

“By 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.”

- Gartner

2 - Sustainable Technology

Sustainable technology is the combination of two concepts: technology that has been designed specifically to remedy or prevent ESG issues or technologies used for this purpose, and technology that has been produced with sustainability in mind.

As a reminder, Environmental technologies are concerned with adaptation and risk prevention actions related to nature, Social technologies are concerned with human rights and Governance technologies aim at strengthening the conduct of business. This can be for instance solar panels, hydro dams, electric vehicles, LED lighting, GPS enabled tractors, moisture sensors, drones and smart irrigation.

Using artificial intelligence, remote sensing with satellites, LiDAR enabled drone reconnaissance can help create detailed assessments of growth within forest ecosystems. Data might also be a very powerful tool. Since every industry is equipped with complex tools to produce optimum results, these very monitoring tools can be used to help maintain the overall health of the planet. Researchers have conceived smart monitoring systems that can help regulate the use of energy. For example, energy management softwares help detect leaks and waste of utilities with regard to their consumption of resources including electricity, gas, water, steam, that are easy to miss and easy to fix with active industrial monitoring.

“By 2027, over 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.” - Gartner

3 - Metaverse

Many of the biggest names in the IT industry share a vision that the Metaverse will be, if not the next “Big Thing”, but at least the next big evolution of the Internet.?

Not surprisingly we know that actors including Meta (!), Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia or Epic Games for example are massively investing on Metaverse. But Lego (the Danish company making plastic brick) is putting together its own software development teams to join the playground too. They are teaming up with EPIC Games and they aim to triple their digital team to 1,800 people by the end of 2023.

The advent of the Metaverse depends in particular on the development and advanced use of technologies such as: Artificial intelligence, Internet of things, Extended reality which is made of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed reality (MR). It also includes, Spatial and edge computing (giving the ability to combine real world and virtual world), Blockchain and even more complex technologies like Brain-computer interface (BCI).?

From another perspective, Wunderman Thompson Intelligence describes Metaverse as persistent, reactive, interoperable, creative, user-defined, decentralized, limitless, social …?

According to all those visionaries, Metaverse represents a real and very serious (and potentially highly lucrative) business opportunity for industries including education, gaming, entertainment, collaboration. It seems that the scope of this technology could extend far beyond that. In the medical field for example, the first prescription treatment delivered through a video game (EndeavorRx) was approved by the FDA for Children with ADHD.

Conclusion

Gartner’s report presents 10 trends: Digital Immune System, Applied Observability, AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM), Industry Cloud Platforms, Platform Engineering, Wireless- Value Realization, Superapps, Adaptive AI, Metaverse and Sustainable Technology.?

I hope this article has whetted your curiosity by introducing you to my favorite topics.

I’d be happy to exchange ideas about the way you see opportunities around these trends. Are you thinking about some of them, are you already engaged in the process of adopting Adaptive AI or Metaverse technologies ? What's your position about ESG technology ?