Gartner Hype Cycle Scopes Out Emerging Technologies

August 19, 2022

Metaverse, super apps and Web3 are among the core technologies enabling evolved immersive experiences.

Cloud sustainability and data observability are helping technologists deliver on emerging business demands.

Autonomic systems and causal AI are supporting accelerated AI model creation and deployment.

The 25 emerging technologies to watch on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2022 are enabling the evolution and expansion of immersive experiences, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) automation and optimizing technologist delivery.

“Emerging technologies offer transformational potential for businesses, but CIOs and technology innovation leaders are challenged to scale digital capabilities while improving sustainability in the face of expanding resource constraints,” said Melissa Davis, VP analyst at Gartner. “It is essential that organizations cut through the noise surrounding emerging technologies to accelerate change by leveraging innovations that drive competitive differentiation and efficiency.”

”Scalability, intuitive interfaces, and implementation speed are essential considerations when pursuing enterprise-wide digitalization technologies. KINEXON focuses on vendor- and technology-agnostic software that can drive efficiency and productivity via process automation based on location data. Real-time locating systems (RTLS) are often already in place but heavily underutilized. With KINEXON OS, we ensure that location data is used to automate across use cases, such as container management, order management, or tool control, as well as across geographic locations worldwide. The added level of visibility over assets and processes is a gamechanger for complex manufacturing operations,” says Mehdi Bentanfous, CEO at KINEXON.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among Gartner Hype Cycles because it identifies key insights from more than 2,000 technologies and applied frameworks that Gartner profiles each year into a succinct set of “must-know” emerging technologies and trends. These technologies and trends have potential to deliver a high degree of competitive advantage over the next two to 10 years (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2022

Source: Gartner (August 2022)

“All technologies on this Hype Cycle are at an early stage, but some are nascent and great uncertainty exists about how they will evolve. Such technologies present greater risks for deployment, but potentially greater benefits for early adopters who can assess and exploit them in line with their organization’s ability to handle unproven technologies,” said Gary Olliffe, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

Blake Connell, Director of Product Marketing at Contrast Security added, "Our firm completely agrees that CIOs and technology innovation leaders are challenged to scale digital capabilities while improving sustainability in the face of expanding resource constraints. We’re seeing these pressures when talking to prospects and current customers who are continuously looking for ways to innovate and scale.

We believe that we will continue to see the rapid adoption of emerging technologies that enable users to cut down the noise, automate manual processes and deliver accurate results that allow enterprises to scale.

In our industry, outdated, manual legacy security tools create friction, slow developers down and clog up the development pipeline. That is why Contrast Security is focused on helping individual developers and enterprises automate application security so that they can take full advantage of the fast-moving application economy.

Emerging technologies like observability-driven development supports the idea that ownership lies with developers to uncover and fix flaws in their code faster; measured in hours not days and weeks. Developing secure code faster will require newer, more modern approaches to application security testing. Providing developers with actionable, relevant information is critical and tools exist today that support this.

We will see the emergence of full end-to-end observability and dashboard reporting that provide users with how-to-fix guidance for easy and fast remediation. This is one form of data observability that will continue to grow moving forward. Another technology that we will see increase in adoption is cloud-native. Cloud-native or serverless technology is closely linked to cloud sustainability as more and more companies look to support digital businesses as well as deliver customer value quickly and continuously."

Three Themes of Emerging Technology Trends

Evolving and Expanding Immersive Experiences: The future of digital experience is immersive. A collection of emerging technologies supports such experiences through dynamic virtual representations, environments and ecosystems of customers and people, as well as new modes of user engagement. With these technologies, individuals can control their own identities and data and experience virtual ecosystems that can be integrated with digital currencies. These technologies help reach customers in new ways to strengthen or open new revenue streams.

The technologies to watch that deliver evolving and expanding immersive experiences are metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), super apps and Web3, decentralized identity, digital humans, digital twin of the customer and internal talent marketplaces.

Accelerated AI Automation: AI adoption is expanding as an integral part of products, services and solutions. This is accelerating the creation of specialized AI models that can be applied to automate model development, training and deployment. AI automation refocuses the role of humans in AI development, resulting in more accurate predictions and decisions and faster time to expected benefits.

The technologies that are supporting accelerated AI automation are autonomic systems, causal AI, foundation models, generative design AI and machine learning code generation.

Optimized Technologist Delivery: Successful digital businesses are built, not bought. A set of emerging technologies focuses on the product, service and solution builder communities, such as fusion teams, and the platforms they use. These technologies provide feedback and insight that optimize and accelerate product, service and solution delivery and increase sustainability of business operations.

“Amidst a ‘perfect storm’ type of environment, warehouse and DC operators are aggressively seeking ways to digitize operations, add automation technology and integrate those technologies with software systems,” said Keith Fisher, president, Honeywell Intelligrated. “The goal is to increase efficiency, reduce the human labor requirement and create safer, more productive workplaces. One of the developing trends we’re seeing in the second half of the year is in the increased use of digital twins.”

Honeywell has experienced engineers in the distribution, fulfillment and manufacturing sectors dedicated to making lasting improvements to warehouse automation system efficiencies. The team can provide data-driven, forward-thinking automation solutions designed to help leading companies maximize operational readiness and ensure future-proof scalability.

By using digital twins and synthetic data modeling, warehouse operators and Honeywell engineers can close the loop between planning, training and implementation on the floor. With this technology, what used to equate to months of automation implementation can now be accomplished in days. In short, warehouse performance can be improved far more quickly and cost-effectively than in the past.

Digital twins deliver virtual representations of a physical environment – proving extremely helpful in the warehouse industry. With a digital twin, new automation technology can be tested virtually, without downtime or rearrangement of physical assets. Automation efforts can be tested, and impact can be reviewed. With a digital twin of the physical system, a machine learning algorithm can run experiments. It usually takes up to a year to create and install a system; but in that time, machine-learning can run its experiments and the physical system can be optimal on the day it goes live.

The critical technologies that are optimizing technologist delivery are augmented FinOps, cloud data ecosystems, cloud sustainability, computational storage, cybersecurity mesh architecture, data observability, dynamic risk governance, industry cloud platforms, minimum viable architecture, observability driven development, OpenTelemetry and platform engineering.

According to Akshay Sharma, CTO, Kovair Software, and former Gartner Analyst, “We agree with the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2022, that immersive experiences, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) automation and optimizing delivery with Cloud Data Ecosystems, and Cloud Platforms for Industry4.0 are at or near the Peak of the Hype Cycle. This will require unique solutions like Kovair’s VSMP: Value Stream Management Platform, for DevSecOps, and integration of Industry4.0 applications via Kovair’s Omnibus. Kovair’s VSDP: Value Stream Delivery Platforms, which is Red Hat Openshift certified, supports process automation and real-time management — as developers leverage modern solutions like pipeline-as-code, Helm charts, and support for increased workflow automation, with WFH: work from home supported. Newer needs will emerge like DBaaS: database as a service, along with Data Lakes for AI/ML Engines as well.”