10 strategic technology trends imperative for leaders: Gartner

There are 10 key strategic technology trends that business leaders should consider for 2023 according to Gartner.

These 10 trends are built around three themes – optimise, scale and pioneer – where technologies can help organisations optimise resilience, operations or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, and pioneer with new forms of engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.

Frances Karamouzis, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner said to enhance their organisation’s financial position during times of economic turbulence, CIOs and IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence while continuing to accelerate digital transformation.

However, in 2023, delivering technology will not be enough. The three key themes are impacted by environmental, social and governance (ESG) expectations and regulations, which translate into the shared responsibility to apply sustainable technologies.

David Groombridge, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner explained, “Every technology investment will need to be set off against its impact on the environment, keeping future generations in mind. ‘Sustainable by default’ as an objective requires sustainable technology.”

The top strategic technology trends for 2023 are as follows:

Sustainability

Sustainability traverses all of the strategic technology trends for 2023. In a recent Gartner survey, CEOs reported that environmental and social changes are now a top three priority for investors, after profit and revenue. This means that executives must invest more in innovative solutions that are designed to address ESG demand to meet sustainability goals.

To do this, Gartner explained that organisations need a new sustainable technology framework that increases the energy and material efficiency of IT services, enables enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, analytics, renewable energy and AI, and deploys IT solutions to help customers achieve their own sustainability goals.

Pioneer

1. Metaverse: By 2027, Gartner predicts that over 40 percent of large organisations worldwide will use a combination of Web3, AR cloud and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.
2. Superapps: By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50 percent of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps.
3. Adaptive AI: Adaptive AI systems aim to continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments based on new data to adapt quickly to changes in real-world circumstances that were not foreseen or available during initial development.

Optimise

1. Digital Immune System: Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.
2. Applied observability: Applied observability feeds these observable artefacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organisational decision-making.
3. AI trust, risk and security management: A Gartner survey in the US, UK and Germany found that 41 percent of organisations had experienced an AI privacy breach or security incident. However, that same survey found that organisations that actively managed AI risk, privacy and security achieved improved AI project results.

Scale

1. Industry cloud platforms: Enterprises can use the packaged capabilities of industry cloud platforms as building blocks to compose unique and differentiating digital business initiatives, providing agility, innovation and reduced time to market, while avoiding lock-in.
2. Platform engineering: Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and life cycle management
3. Wireless value realisation: As networks move beyond pure connectivity, they will provide insight using built-in analysis and low-power systems will harvest energy directly from the network. This means the network will become a source of direct business value.