Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: A

Gartner Trend Insight Report

Published: 13 March 2019 ID: G00383829

Analyst(s): David Cearley, Brian Burke

The intelligent digital mesh continues to coalesce, driven by advancements

in AI, digital twins, immersive experiences, digital ethics and other strategic
trends. IT leaders must evaluate the business impact of these disruptive
technology trends to identify opportunities for business innovation.

Opportunities and Challenges

■ Applications, services and Internet of Things (IoT) objects will increasingly use artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning to deliver greater automation and human augmentation.
Working with business to identify opportunities, developing skills, and selecting tools to build,
manage and govern these solutions will be a key IT challenge.
■ Digital twins of people, processes and things will create an ever-richer digital representation of
the real world, while immersive experiences will change how we perceive and interact with the
digital and real worlds. Integration and coordination challenges across this complex
environment will slow adoption.
■ Organizations will be at a serious disadvantage if they don’t have a formal mechanism for
identifying technology trends that are reaching key tipping points, and for prioritizing those with
the biggest potential impact.

What You Need to Know

■ Organizations will apply AI and machine learning for greater automation, using them to replace
people in some areas and augment them in others. Developing or acquiring skills for AI-driven
application development and AI-driven business innovation should be a key imperative.
■ The IoT, digital twins and immersive experiences — powered by AI — will support the delivery of
smart spaces such as smart cities, intelligent digital workplaces and smart factories. Digital
ethics and privacy issues will increase in importance in this world of smart spaces, powered by
AI.
 ■ Blockchain and quantum computing have significant long-term potential, but will remain
immature through 2024. Focus on blockchain-inspired models today, and prepare for the impact
of quantum computing from 2025 to 2030.

Insight From the Analyst

The Combined Impact of Trends and the Need for Continuous Innovation Is Driving a
New Look at Technology Trends

David Cearley, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst and Gartner Fellow

The way we experience a digitally enabled world is changing. Through 2024, AI (see Note 1) will
seep into every software, service and physical asset, driving a new level of automation. That
automation will free us for more creative activities — AI augments humans. Future solutions driven
by AI will open up a new era for digital business.

Lines between the virtual world and real world are blurring, making technology an even greater part
of our lives 24/7. This will create an intelligent digital experience enabling smart spaces across
personal, social and commercial experiences. This experience and the associated digital business
ecosystems require big shifts to support them.

We call these shifts the intelligent digital mesh, and it forms the basis of our top 10 strategic
technology trends for 2019. You can implement elements of the mesh today, while the model
continues to evolve through 2024. If you’re not the disruptor in the rapidly changing digital
landscape, someone else will try to steal your future.

Here, we explore how:

■ AI is becoming a foundation for all future applications, services and physical products, and how
application development changes in this new world.
■ Digital twins of people, processes and things create a new reality where the world around us is
“the computer,” with compute, storage and sensors throughout the environment.
■ New immersive experiences change how we perceive and control the digital world with a new
multisensory and multidevice interface.
■ The increasing complexity and dynamism of connections between people, organizations and
technology-based systems change data models and drive a new view of smart spaces.
■ You can identify, categorize and analyze the strategic technology trends that will affect your
organization most.

Kind Regards,

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 David Cearley

Executive Overview
Definition
Our top 10 strategic technology trends could significantly impact people, businesses, industries and
IT markets. They create potential business threats and disruptions, but also offer the opportunity to
disrupt competitors and drive competitive advantage. They fall into three focused themes and one
broad theme that drive long-term market shifts:

■ The intelligent theme explores how AI — with a particular emphasis on machine learning — is
seeping into virtually every existing technology and creating entirely new technology categories.
The exploitation of AI will be a major battleground for technology providers through 2023. Using
AI for well-scoped and targeted purposes delivers more flexible, insightful and increasingly
autonomous systems.
■ The digital theme focuses on blending the digital and physical worlds to create a natural and
immersive digitally enhanced experience. As the amount of data that things produce increases
exponentially, compute power shifts to the edge to process stream data and send summary
data to central systems. Digital trends, along with opportunities enabled by AI, are driving the
next generation of digital business and the creation of digital business ecosystems.
■ The mesh theme refers to exploiting connections between an expanding set of people and
businesses — as well as devices, content and services — to deliver digital business outcomes.
The mesh demands new capabilities that reduce friction, provide in-depth security and respond
to events across these connections.
■ The broad trends theme cuts across the intelligent digital mesh. The underlying issue of digital
ethics and privacy permeates everything we do with technology. Quantum computing is an
emerging trend that could have a big impact in the longer term.

Trends under each of the themes continue to evolve. The individual trends and related technologies
are combining to begin realizing the overall vision of the intelligent digital mesh. For example,
organizations are using AI, in the form of automated things and augmented intelligence, together
with the IoT, edge computing and digital twins, to deliver highly integrated smart spaces. The
combined effect of multiple trends coalescing to produce new opportunities and drive new
disruption is a hallmark of our top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019 (see Figure 1).

Our top 10 strategic technology trends are rapidly evolving

breakout trends with the most disruptive potential through
2025. These are the trends you can’t afford to ignore.

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 Figure 1. Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019

Source: Gartner (March 2019)

Research Highlights
Intelligent: Driving AI and Machine Learning Into Software and Systems
Creating systems that learn, adapt and, potentially, act autonomously will be a major battleground
for technology vendors through at least 2024. The ability to use AI to enhance decision making,
reinvent business models and ecosystems, create entirely new products, and remake the customer
experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.

Three key trends are emerging from the intelligent theme:

■ Autonomous things
■ Augmented analytics
■ AI-driven development

Autonomous Things: Using AI to automate functions in physical devices, software or services is

enabling the creation of autonomous things such as advanced robots, autonomous vehicles and
intelligent agents. Intelligent things create opportunities in sectors and industries such as retail,
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where robots are acting as baristas and store greeters, and farming, where self-driving tractors,
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robots and drones could increase farm yields and efficiencies. Existing things will become

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 intelligent and autonomous, potentially delivering the power of AI-enabled systems everywhere,
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including the home and medical facilities. Autonomous software adds value to applications and IT
systems such as network management, where AI-powered systems can drive greater efficiency and
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effectiveness with higher performance. As autonomous things evolve, they’ll start to work together
in collaborative swarms.

Augmented Analytics: Augmented intelligence explores the use of machine learning and AI
techniques to augment and support human activity. Augmented analytics uses automated machine
learning to transform how analytics content is developed, consumed and shared. It includes
automated data preparation, automated model and insight generation, and automated visualization
generation and natural-language narrated insights. Augmented analytics automates various aspects
of expert data scientist and data engineering functions. This empowers “citizen data scientists,”
enabling them to analyze data and build AI and machine learning models on their own.

AI-Driven Development: AI-driven development explores two separate, but related, themes. First, it
explores the evolution of tools, technologies and best practices for embedding AI capabilities into
applications. The tools used to build AI-powered solutions are expanding, from tools targeting data
scientists (AI infrastructure, AI frameworks and AI platforms) to tools targeting the professional
developer community (AI platforms and AI services). Second, AI-driven development explores the
use of AI to create AI-powered tools used in the development process itself. The tools used to build
traditional or AI-powered solutions are themselves being empowered with AI-driven capabilities that
assist professional developers and automate tasks related to the development of AI-enhanced
solutions.

Related Research
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Autonomous Things”: Autonomous things will
have a massive impact on business, the economy and society as technology advances,
regulations evolve and cultural barriers are overcome. Enterprise architecture and technology
innovation leaders must exploit viable opportunities and plan for the impact of autonomous
things.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Augmented Analytics”: Machine-learning-
enabled tools that automate many activities normally done by professional data scientists will
empower citizen data scientists to build advanced analytics models. Enterprise architecture and
technology innovation leaders must evaluate these products.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: AI-Driven Development”: As artificial intelligence
spreads through the enterprise, solutions will emerge that empower developers with the
specialized skills and tools to generate AI-enabled applications. Enterprise architecture and
technology innovation leaders must follow this and the use of AI to automate aspects of AD.
■ “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2018”: AI is almost a definition of hype. Yet, it is still early:
New ideas will surface and some current ideas will not live up to expectations. This Hype Cycle
will help CIOs and IT leaders trace essential trends and innovations to determine scope, state,
value and risk in their AI plans.

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 ■ “Hype Cycle for Drones and Mobile Robots, 2018”: Drones and mobile robots are deployed to
sense and manipulate data in remote areas that are hard for humans to reach. They can also
provide improved safety, superior proficiency and lower costs.

Digital: Bringing Together the Real and Virtual Worlds

The lines between the physical and digital worlds continue to blur. The converged digital world will
reflect the physical world in increasing detail and will appear as part of the physical world. As the
amount of data that things produce increases exponentially, compute power shifts to the edge to
process stream data and send relevant data to central systems. Digital trends, along with
opportunities enabled by AI, are driving the next generation of digital business models.

Three key trends are emerging from the digital theme:

■ Digital twins
■ Empowered edge
■ Immersive experience

Digital Twins: A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. Digital twins
are dynamic software models of people, processes and things that are linked to the real-world twin
and incorporate data about how the real-world entity is operating. You can use a digital twin to
analyze and simulate real-world conditions, respond to changes, improve operations, and add
value. This creates new opportunities for AI-based analysis or, in some cases, control of the real-
world entity. From a taxonomy perspective, digital twins can start at the discrete level, based on a
single person, process or thing. As most enterprises are systems of systems, the digital twin may
have a composite and an organizational level reflecting its broader, integrated status.

Empowered Edge: In edge computing, information processing and content collection and delivery
are placed closer to the sources, repositories and users of this information. The empowered edge
drives greater compute, storage and sensors into the physical world, creating new digital business
opportunities. Edge computing draws from the concepts of distributed processing. Connectivity and
latency challenges, bandwidth constraints, and greater functionality embedded at the edge favor
distributed deployment models. Edge computing favors placing workloads where they fit best
across a centralized/decentralized framework. The advantages of scalability of processing power
and low costs of operating at hyperscale, coupled with the complexity of managing and
coordinating thousands of geographically separated endpoints, favor the centralized model.
Through 2028, we expect a steady increase in the embedding of sensor, storage, compute and
advanced AI capabilities, as well as improved software and security capabilities, in edge devices.
5G will emerge to provide greater edge density, lower latency and higher throughput. Cloud and
edge computing are combining into complementary elements of a cloud/edge model.

Immersive Experience: Through 2028, the user experience will undergo a significant shift in how
users perceive the digital world and how they interact with it. Conversational platforms are changing
the way in which people interact with the digital world. Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed
reality are changing the way in which people perceive the digital world. This combined shift in both
perception and interaction models leads to the future immersive user experience. The model will

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 shift from one of technology-literate people to one of people-literate technology. The burden of
translating intent will move from the user to the computer. The ability to communicate with users
across many human senses will provide a richer environment for delivering nuanced information.

Related Research
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Digital Twins”: Digital twins — digital
representations of people, processes and things — will become more connected, providing a
rich and real-time view of company processes and assets. Enterprise architecture and
technology innovation leaders must plan for a diverse environment with integration challenges.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Empowered Edge”: Expect robust hardware and
software capabilities integrated into edge devices, with cloud models extending to gateways,
servers and edge devices, and 5G supporting communication to and from the edge. Enterprise
architecture and technology innovation leaders must manage these increasing complexities.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Immersive Experience”: The way we perceive
and interact with the virtual world is changing into a rich, multidimensional and multimodal
experience. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must identify
opportunities to create compelling immersive experiences for both customers and employees.
■ “Hype Cycle for the Internet of Things, 2018”: The Internet of Things is helping to blend the
physical and digital world, and it will transform industries and the way we live and work. This
Hype Cycle helps enterprises assess the critical building blocks and the levels of maturity and
hype associated with IoT.
■ “Hype Cycle for Human-Machine Interface, 2018”: Multimodal interfaces and progress in
machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence are profoundly impacting the human-
machine interface. Technology product managers must design interaction around multimodal,
personalized technologies.

Mesh: Making and Securing the Connection

The mesh theme refers to exploiting connections between an expanding set of people, businesses
and processes — as well as devices, content and services — to deliver digital business outcomes.
As connections become more complex, new capabilities are needed to reduce business and
technology friction, and simplify the integration and coordination across these systems. These
capabilities are also needed to create immersive experiences supporting a rich set of digital twins of
people, processes and things.

Two key trends are emerging from the mesh theme:

■ Blockchain
■ Smart spaces

Blockchain: A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger. A distributed ledger is an expanding

chronologically ordered list of cryptographically signed, irrevocable transactional records shared by

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 all participants in a network. Blockchain provides business value by removing friction. It does this by
making the ledger independent of individual applications and participants, and replicating the ledger
across a distributed network to create a consensus-based authoritative record of significant events.
Blockchain also enables a distributed trust architecture that allows untrusted parties to undertake
commercial transactions, and create and exchange value using a range of assets. Blockchain could
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transform industry operating models in areas such as music distribution, identity verification, the
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pharmaceutical supply chain and registry of property ownership. However, complete blockchain
solutions face challenges that will undermine the delivery of robust scalable solutions through 2023.
Many implementations use just three main components of the blockchain concept:

■ Some version of a data store independent of specific applications or organizations

■ Cryptography (hashing/signing)
■ A messaging layer

These blockchain-inspired solutions can achieve operational efficiency and reduce technical and
business friction by providing a shared ledger across applications and companies accessing the
data. They may enhance sharing of information among known entities, and improve opportunities
for tracking and tracing physical and digital assets. Blockchain-inspired approaches enable an
organization to proceed with blockchain, while avoiding expensive and potentially painful structural
changes in business model and process. However, such approaches miss the value of true
blockchain disruption and may increase vendor lock-in.

Smart Spaces: A smart space is a physical or digital environment in which humans and
technology-enabled systems interact in increasingly open, connected, coordinated and intelligent
ecosystems. Multiple elements — including people, processes, services and things — come
together in a smart space to create a more immersive, interactive and automated experience for a
target set of personas or industry scenarios. This trend has been coalescing around elements such
as smart cities, urban corridors, digital workplaces, smart homes and smart factories. The market is
entering a period of accelerated delivery of robust smart spaces, with technology becoming an
integral part of daily lives, whether as employees, customers, consumers, community members or
citizens. AI-related trends, the expansion of IoT-connected edge devices, the development of digital
twins of things and organizations, and the maturing of blockchain offer increasing opportunities to
drive more connected, coordinated and intelligent solutions across target environments. The key
value of smart spaces is their ability to deliver an integrated set of solutions with an immersive
environment for users — an ambient user experience in which the environment around us becomes
the computer. Multimodal and multichannel interfaces greatly simplify use of the dense technology
that surrounds us. Ecosystems that emerge will enable multiple entities — government, IT providers,
enterprises and even consumers — to interact with one another to deliver a dynamically integrated
system. Smart spaces will evolve in pockets. The full vision probably won’t mature until 2029 at the
earliest.

Related Research
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Blockchain”: As blockchain evolves to become
viable for commercial implementations, it provides trust without a central authority and reduces

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 friction across the business ecosystem. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation
leaders must identify opportunities for using blockchain technologies.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Smart Spaces”: Artificial intelligence, IoT-
connected edge devices, digital twins and blockchain are combining to make smart spaces a
reality. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must assess how industry-
specific spaces can simplify user experience, boost productivity and optimize buildings.
■ “Hype Cycle for Blockchain Technologies, 2018”: Blockchain technical capabilities are evolving,
but fail to match the extreme hype and are not yet sufficient for mission-critical enterprise use.
Blockchain-inspired solutions lead enterprise conversations. The market will traverse the Trough
of Disillusionment before significant value is realized.

Broad Trends Across the Intelligent Digital Mesh

Trends under each of the three core themes continue to evolve. More importantly, the individual
trends and related technologies are combining to begin realizing the overall vision embodied in the
intelligent digital mesh. For example, organizations are using AI, in the form of automated things and
augmented intelligence, together with the IoT, edge computing and digital twins, to deliver highly
integrated smart city spaces. The combined effect of multiple trends coalescing to produce new
opportunities and drive new disruption is a hallmark of our top 10 strategic technology trends for
2019.

Two broad trends in our 2019 top 10 list span all three core themes.

Digital ethics and privacy are critical elements of any technology decision. Regulatory frameworks
such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will continue to proliferate, but this
trend isn’t simply about compliance.

By 2021, organizations that bypass privacy requirements and

are caught lacking in privacy protection will pay 100% more in
compliance costs than competitors that adhere to best
practice.

Best practice means focusing not only on what you have to do, but also on what you should do
ethically with regard to issues such as specific applications of AI or the creation of digital twins of
people for marketing purposes. Organizations that focus on transparency and involve key
stakeholders as part of a digital ethics approach will build trust with users and enhance their brand.

Quantum computing is an emerging trend with the potential for significant impact between 2023
and 2025. As such, we would not normally include it in our list of top 10 trends, which usually
consists of trends that we expect will have a significant commercial impact within five years.
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However, recent advances, , the potential disruption of quantum computing, and the challenges of
understanding it and applying it to business problems make it an important trend to add to an

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 organization’s strategic roadmap. If quantum computing reaches its potential, it will influence the
evolution of many aspects of the intelligent digital mesh.

Related Research
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Digital Ethics and Privacy”: As global privacy
regulations take hold, organizations face increasing risks in acquiring, securing and maintaining
personal information. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must manage
personal information ethically to earn trust and gain competitive advantage.
■ “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Quantum Computing”: The emerging quantum
computing trend could have a significant impact on artificial intelligence, machine learning and
business. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must assess the potential
and direction of QC development, and plan for QC’s impact on security and applications.

Identifying and Applying Strategic Technology Trends

We use insights from analysts across Gartner and key research projects — including Hype Cycles,
Predicts and Magic Quadrants — to identify and evaluate candidate trends. We select trends for the
top 10 based on three key evaluations (see “Use a Trendspotting Method to Identify the Technology
Trends You Need to Track”):

■ Impact and disruption. Strategic trends can have a significant impact. They have the potential
to disrupt existing technologies, individuals and societies. This disruption may occur across
multiple industries and regions. We examine trends’ effects on humans (as consumers,
employees and customers), business, IT and the technology market. We give more weight to
trends that will have an impact over the next five years for which organizations could take action
in the next three years.
■ Volatility and tipping points. Technology trends (and the individual technologies that relate to
them) tend to evolve along a traditional market curve that can be divided into emerging, growth
and mainstream phases (see Figure 2). This research focuses on trends that cut across this
market life cycle view. Our top 10 strategic technology trends are reaching a tipping point (for
example, breaking out of an emerging state to a growth state) or are experiencing rapid change.
These changes often challenge conventional wisdom about the trend, justifying a fresh look.
■ Market dynamics. Market dynamics describes the level of investment by venture capital firms,
established vendors and early adopters. It also considers the level of market interest and hype.
It assesses the degree to which mainstream organizations understand the trend, its impact and
its future progression, and factors the trend into their strategic and tactical plans. It’s important
to consider trends that are experiencing much market hype (such as vendor marketing, blogs
and press articles), at least to contextualize what the trends mean for organizations. Trends that
have a high impact potential and have reached critical tipping points, but aren’t well-understood
or factored into current plans, are also important targets for evaluation. Industry factors and the
size of the organization must be analyzed when applying the technology trends in specific
enterprise scenarios.

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 Figure 2. The Evolution of Strategic Technology Trends

Source: Gartner (March 2019)

The top 10 is not a ranked list, with one trend being more important than the others. Rather, it’s a list
of interconnected trends, with their relative importance shifting by industry, business need and the
organization’s maturity. Organizations must examine the potential impact of these trends, factor
them into their strategic planning for 2019, and adjust business models and operations
appropriately. The ability to identify trends that are poised to break out of the emerging state and
navigate the rapid pace of change with growth trends leads directly to competitive advantage.

The increasing rate of technological innovation requires organizations to evaluate the impacts of
strategic technology trends. Organizations must identify the technology trends — single trends or a
combination — that will significantly affect them. This evaluation isn’t limited to one role in the IT
organization, or even to IT itself — it cuts across the entire organization, with various groups
bringing a unique perspective. For example:

■ CIOs and CTOs lead the way. They work with business executives to set the vision for the
organization’s technology-enabled business initiatives, and establish the culture and process
within IT to deliver this vision. They must ensure that the IT organization works closely with the
business to explore strategic technology trends and factor their impact into enterprise and
business strategy and architecture. CIOs and CTOs are the people looking for the skills to
deliver the intelligent digital mesh.
■ EA and technology innovation leaders must work across IT and the business to support
strategic business and technology strategies that meet current business needs, while

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 simultaneously enabling business innovation. They must factor these trends, and their business
and technology implications, into future EA models and initiatives. They should identify value by
assessing impact and feasibility at a granular level, and focus on addressing concrete business
opportunities and problems. They must articulate the impact of each technology to key
stakeholders by using techniques such as business capability modeling. By using a structured
approach to evaluate disruptive technologies, EA leaders can increase the opportunities for
technology innovation and reduce the risks.
■ Technology leaders across IT, including infrastructure and operations, applications, and
security, have an important role to play in tracking and addressing strategic trends. These
professionals examine the individual technologies in detail. They need to understand the trends’
implications for current and future technology architectures, supporting technologies, and best
practices. This may require additional internal training or bringing in subject matter experts.
■ Business leaders evaluate these trends’ potential impact, rather than focusing on their
technical details. Working with technology innovation professionals, they must consider the
implications of these trends on current and future business activities.

Related Research
■ “Use a Trendspotting Method to Identify the Technology Trends You Need to Track”: Enterprise
architecture and technology innovation leaders are tasked with discerning the difference
between the reality and the hype of disruptive, emerging technology trends. This research
presents a model for identifying the technology trends they need to watch and potentially
respond to.
■ “Midsize Enterprises: Applying the 3 Most Practical of Gartner’s 2019 Top Strategic Technology
Trends”: Midsize enterprise CIOs must focus on practical application of the top 10 technology
trends in 2019, or risk getting caught in a wave of hype that sweeps them into technology
trends that are simply impractical for midsize enterprises.
■ “Technology Innovation Primer for 2019”: Business leaders count on enterprise architects to
understand emerging technology opportunities and drive strategic business innovations.
Gartner’s 2019 research will provide EA and technology innovation leaders, including CTOs,
with insights to lead and drive their organizations’ transformations.
■ “How Leading Enterprise Architects Prepare Business Leaders for Business Transformation
Through Ideation Workshops”: Collaboration is vital to the success of digital transformation.
Leading enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must foster innovation
mindsets in all employees to ensure that transformation efforts are strategically driven,
implementable, and challenge the status quo.
■ “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018”: Our 2018 Hype Cycle reveals five emerging
technology trends that profoundly shift experiences in our spaces, blur the lines between
human and machine, and enable AI ubiquity that will propel organizations to connect into new
business ecosystems to become competitive over the next decade.

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 Changes Since Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Our top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019 build on and evolve our 2018 list. They reflect the
continued focus on building greater intelligence into systems to drive digitalization across an ever-
more dynamic and complex mesh of connected people, processes and things (the intelligent digital
mesh).

We’ve evolved, extended, enhanced or combined seven trends from our 2018 list:

■ The intelligent things trend shifts to autonomous things to emphasize the use of AI to drive
greater automation into systems. The autonomous things trend also expands the notion of AI-
enhanced systems to include software-based autonomous things (such as intelligent agents)
and physical things (such as robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and appliances). We’re
introducing the idea that many of these areas overlap with one another.
■ The Intelligent apps and analytics trend shifts to focus on augmented analytics. This
technology is gaining momentum as virtually all vendors of analytics and business intelligence
are delivering or plan to deliver some aspect of it. Rapid evolution of these capabilities and
widely differing capabilities from vendors make close scrutiny of the offering critical.
■ Cloud to the edge shifts to empowered edge as a broader concept. The complementary
nature of cloud computing and edge computing remains an important part of the trend. The
trend has broadened with the emergence of 5G to provide rich communications to the edge,
and with the expansion of compute, storage, specialized processors and sensor capabilities at
the edge.
■ The immersive experience and conversational platforms trends have consolidated into a
single immersive experience trend. How we perceive and interact with the digital world is
becoming multisensory (for example, using hearing, touch and sight) and multimodal (for
example, using mobile devices, desktops, embedded devices and autonomous vehicles). This
shift will continue through 2029, making immersive experience a long-term trend.
■ Digital twins first appeared on our top 10 list in 2017 and gained greater market attention in
2018. The concept is now an integral part of many IoT initiatives and their supporting platforms.
Integration, data and intellectual property ownership, and monetization continue to be
challenges. But the core idea of a digital twin in an IoT context is becoming mainstream. In
2019, digital twins are breaking out of the IoT space, with digital twins of an organization and
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DigitalOps strategies gaining momentum.
■ Blockchain has been shifting from understanding the concept and early exploration in 2017 to
delivering early pilots and implementations in 2018. In 2019, the limitations of a full blockchain
implementation are becoming apparent, and blockchain itself is sliding toward the Trough of
Disillusionment on the Gartner Hype Cycle. However, blockchain remains on our top 10 list
because of its long-term potential. Also, blockchain-inspired implementations that emphasize a
shared ledger without many of the other attributes of blockchain are showing near-term
potential to reduce business and technology friction between systems and organizations.

We’ve introduced four new trends for 2019:

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 ■ AI-driven development recognizes the changes in development tools and skill sets affected by
AI. Two separate, but related, practices are addressed in this trend: AI services being made
available to developers as part of the application development (AD) platform, and AI being used
to automate aspects of the AD process. Both areas are new for most organizations, requiring an
examination of what they mean for the future of AD. We expect significant volatility over the next
few years as these areas mature.
■ Smart spaces is a trend coalescing from many directions, including smart cities, digital
workplaces, smart factories and smart buildings. Most organizations rightly view these as
separate and disconnected initiatives today, but all have a common theme of embedding
technology-enabled capabilities into a target environment.
■ Digital ethics and privacy focuses on the growing concern of individuals, and involvement by
governments, in policing how organizations use personal data and apply technologies such as
AI. This growing trend reached an important tipping point with the implementation of the GDPR
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in 2018, widely reported data breaches exposing personal information and questionable uses
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of personal data (such as by Cambridge Analytica ). Our 2019 trend shifts the emphasis from
adhering to privacy regulations to establishing a broader digital ethics approach.
■ Quantum computing is an emerging trend that is unlikely to be used in commercial
applications until 2024 to 2029. We wouldn’t normally consider such a trend for inclusion in our
top 10. However, we’ve included quantum computing because it represents a radical departure
from conventional computing models. It has the potential to address problems that even
supercomputers can’t. Given the disruptive potential of quantum computing, it’s prudent to
understand its possible impact, build scenarios for it and prepare systems for the effect it could
have on security.

We’ve retired three trends that were on our 2018 list. When we remove a trend from our top 10 list, it
doesn’t mean that it’s no longer strategic. We retire trends because they’re becoming more mature
and less volatile than the other strategic trends. Typically, most organizations understand these
trends better and have already factored them into their strategic thinking. The trends we’ve retired
are:

■ AI foundation. The 2017 trend of AI and advanced machine learning morphed into AI
foundation for 2018, to reflect the increasing use of AI-related technologies in virtually every
technology-enabled software and hardware system. Both trends focused on the fundamentals
of AI, with an emphasis on machine learning and how AI and machine learning were creeping
into every vendor strategy. Understanding AI and the necessary skills were key aspects. All
these areas remain important, but the market is shifting from an “understand AI” phase to an
“implement AI” phase. Our trends have shifted to those implementation areas.
■ Event-driven model. The importance of events increased as elements of the mesh app and
service architecture matured (see “Adopt a Multigrained Mesh App and Service Architecture to
Enable Your Digital Business Technology Platform”). In 2018, event thinking and the associated
event-driven architecture were becoming ever-more important elements of digital business
process design, mesh app and service architecture solution design, and infrastructure. This is
continuing, but the market understanding and future direction of this trend have matured.

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 Although newer breakout trends have displaced the event-driven model in our top 10 list,
events remain critically important.
■ Continuous adaptive risk and trust. This replaced the 2017 trend of adaptive security
architecture. The 2018 trend emphasized the balancing of risk with trust, and an acceptance
that 100% security is generally unachievable. Tools and processes to provide security will
always be important. But we’ve retired continuous adaptive risk and trust from our list because
of the maturing understanding of security-related trends and a reduction in their volatility. We’ve
replaced it with digital ethics and privacy, which is gaining greater market attention. Security will
probably return to our top 10 list in the future because of looming security challenges related to
AI and other topics.

Related Priorities
Table 1. Related Priorities

Priority Focus

Building and Expanding a The "building and expanding a digital business" initiative shows how to take digital
Digital Business business through the cycle, from strategy to development, to full-scale operation, to re-
envisioning.

Enterprise Architecture Building an EA discipline helps business and IT leaders formulate and execute strategy
using data-driven business models and digital platforms to deliver innovative new
business and operating models.

CIO Innovation and In the digital era, the CIO serves as both business leader and IT leader. This initiative
Strategic Business focuses on the first job, showing how the CIO can contribute to an enterprisewide
Change Leadership business strategy.

Source: Gartner

Gartner Analysts Supporting This Trend

David Cearley

Brian Burke

Gartner, Inc. | G00383829 Page 15 of 18

 Related Resources
Webinars
“The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019”

“Debunk AI Myths and Misconceptions”

“Strategic Framework for AI Use Cases by Industry”

“Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends That Will Change Your Business”

Articles
“Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019”

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

“Predicts 2019: Artificial Intelligence Core Technologies”

“Predicts 2019: Blockchain Technologies”

“Predicts 2019: Analytics and BI Strategy”

“Predicts 2019: The Ambiguous Future of Privacy”

“Predicts 2019: Digital Ethics, Policy and Governance Are Key to Success With Artificial
Intelligence”

“Predicts 2019: Smart Cities Will Mitigate Social and Resilience Risks and Reward Digital
Opportunities”

Evidence
1 “This Robot Will Brew Your Coffee and Serve You for $3.” Money.

2 “Lowe’sIntroduces LoweBot — The Next-Generation Robot to Enhance the Home Improvement

Shopping Experience in the Bay Area.” Lowe’s.

3 “Future of Farming: Driverless Tractors, Ag Robots.” CNBC.

4 “LG Investing in AI for Smart Appliances, Autonomous Driving.” ZDNet.

5 “Google DeepMind to Deploy AI to Identify Cancer From CT and MRI Scans.” V3.

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 6 “Putting Machine Learning to Use for Network Management.” No Jitter.

7 “How Blockchain Can Change the Music Industry.” TechCrunch.

8 “Identity Management on the Blockchain.” ShoCard.

9 “Blockchain Technology Can Help Reduce Flow of Counterfeit Drugs.” Nasdaq.

10 “IBM Hits Quantum Computing Milestone, May See ‘Quantum Advantage’ in 2020s.” ZDNet.

11 “Google Moves Toward Quantum Supremacy With 72-Qubit Computer.” Science News.

12 “How to Industrialize and Reuse Core Product Capabilities and Processes With DigitalOps
Initiatives”

13 “The Most Infamous Data Breaches.” Techworld.

14 “Facebook Fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica Scandal.” BBC.

Note 1 Artificial Intelligence Isn’t the Same as Human Intelligence

Human intelligence refers to the natural cognitive ability of human beings. Human intelligence is a
broad, generalized activity, while AI mimics narrow aspects of human intelligence in a tightly
bounded domain for a well-scoped purpose.

AI is designed to add humanlike qualities, but is extremely limited in comparison. AI-based systems
aren’t autonomous and don’t understand or learn in the same sense that a human being
understands, learns and acts autonomously. Rather, they apply machine learning techniques and
appear to understand and act autonomously, but only within a specific area and with a well-defined
purpose.

An AI-enhanced system can make probabilistic projections, come to conclusions that weren’t
explicitly programmed and adapt its rule set based on observations. But it can’t expand beyond its
defined domain and purpose. For example, an autonomous vehicle can’t “learn” how to play chess
by receiving data on chess.

The term “intelligent” in this research refers to the use of AI and related advanced machine learning
techniques in a system.

Gartner, Inc. | G00383829 Page 17 of 18

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