She specialises in translation, writing and knowledge management. In her work, she combines her passion for languages with an interest in technology. Privately, she was part of a team of volunteers responsible for the Polish translation of “Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear” video game.
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Times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty call for new measures of driving efficiencies, boosting productivity, and delivering innovation. Gartner has analysed a spectrum of factors affecting businesses worldwide and collated them with emerging technologies to formulate predictions on tech trends that will dominate the market in 2023 and beyond. Whether your company is planning to focus on cost management or is anticipating growth and new opportunities, according to Gartner, the way to succeed is to optimise, scale, and pioneer — with the use of right technology.
Strategic Technology Trends for 2023
The abovementioned three main themes permeate all of the trends but, at the same time, allow companies to take a customised approach to leveraging technology. It’s all about your business goals — do you see a need to save costs and reinvest? Are there opportunities ahead you plan on seizing? Is this the moment to transform or reinvent your business model? Perhaps you want to do it all? Gartner’s selection of trends presents ways of achieving these goals by optimising operations and boosting resilience, scaling vertical solutions and delivery, and pioneering new levels of customer engagement. Let’s explore these strategic technology trends for 2023.
- Sustainable Technology
Sustainability is an all-pervasive part of all the listed trends and should be central to all technology initiatives. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organisation. Currently, however, sustainability efforts in IT require balancing the need for increased business productivity against the company’s environmental goals. Even technologies that can enable more sustainable solutions, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), also contribute to greenhouse emissions.
Organisations now require a new sustainability framework and solutions that will help them achieve environmental, social, and governance outcomes. IT and business leaders need to strive for reduced energy and material use in IT services, enable enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, emissions management software, and AI, and create solutions that will support their customers’ sustainability goals. - Improved Resilience With Digital Immune Systems
Companies that fail to address the security, stability, and scalability of their products, whether due to the lack of the required skillset, inability to handle unexpected events, or accruing technical debt, may not deliver the expected business value and risk losing revenue. A solution is to create a digital immune system — a roadmap of strategies and technologies for software development, automation, design, and analytics.
Combining observability, automation, and testing best practices will help you mitigate risks and make your systems more resilient, which will lead to improved customer experience. According to Gartner, by 2025, organisations that invest in building digital immunity will boost customer satisfaction by decreasing downtime by 80%, which will translate into higher revenue. - Applied Observability for Enhanced Operations
Gartner’s technology trends for 2023 include observability, which is all about accelerating and improving the decision-making process in an enterprise so that its operations can be optimised in real time. This requires utilising observable data artifacts (logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads, and file transfers) in an integrated and orchestrated way to make faster and more accurate decisions.
In the applied observability approach, data is collected from confirmed stakeholder actions and their context and leveraged to create an efficient feedback loop. It can be then used to achieve a nearly real-time response to customer behaviour and gain a competitive advantage from increased loyalty. Gartner stresses that applied observability, when approached strategically, is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making and should be treated as an important monetisable asset. - Trust, Risk, and Security Management for AI
With companies increasingly reliant on AI-enabled solutions and analytics, managing risks and ensuring the security of AI operations becomes imperative. Gartner has found that inadequate trust or security controls severely hamper AI projects — almost half of AI models don’t make it into production due to security, ethics, or privacy issues.
The way to address these issues is a focused approach Gartner refers to as AI TRiSM (artificial intelligence trust, risk, and security management). Companies should use a collection of tools and processes that will make AI results easier to explain, help deploy new models rapidly, and enable proactive management of AI security, with controls for privacy and ethics issues. Implementing AI TRiSM is predicted to bring a 50% improvement in the adoption of AI models, with greater user acceptance and successful delivery of business goals. - Scaling Vertically With Industry Cloud Platforms
Modern organisations are focused on business value and choose cloud platforms that allow them to scale their business by addressing the specific requirements of their sector. Therefore, more and more companies are going to leverage vertical-market cloud platforms — according to Gartner, by 2027, this will be the case for over 50% of enterprises.
Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) capabilities together with vertical-specific functionalities and modularity to support the precise needs of a particular industry. The packaged business capabilities of industry cloud platforms can be used as building blocks to create new digital initiatives and differentiated business offerings. This way, businesses can reduce time-to-market and drive agility, efficiency, and innovation. - Platform Engineering for Product Delivery
The complexity of modern architectures and the need to handle hybrid infrastructures (perhaps with a non-expert level of knowledge) can hold development teams back from delivering at the expected speed and scale. The growing friction can be mitigated by building engineering platforms that provide a curated set of tools, capabilities, and processes, delivered in a self-service development portal.
Platform engineering improves the developer experience by integrating common reusable components and all the necessary tools while automating the deployment and management of the underlying infrastructure. Empowering development teams with comprehensive, well-maintained, self-service developer portals will result in accelerated delivery of customer value, and the platform engineering trend will continue in years to come. - Realising Value From Wireless Technologies
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will have five or more wireless technologies bridged across an intelligent connectivity overlay, up from less than 3%. As companies grow and scale, they will need connectivity that extends beyond traditional communications. Wireless technologies will be used in new ways — and no single one will dominate the market.
The wireless value realisation trend is exactly about leveraging a spectrum of wireless protocols to cater for all environments, from office Wi-Fi, through mobile services, to low-power networks and radio connectivity. The expanded capabilities of wireless technology will serve as a foundation for digital innovation, and harnessing the most value will require a comprehensive strategy for exploiting the combined benefits of multiple wireless solutions.
- Engaging Customers With Superapps
Creating superapps will be a way of pioneering customer engagement. A superapp combines the functionalities of an application, platform, and ecosystem and provides users with a set of core features and access to independently created miniapps.
Superapps share data with the miniapps within them and allow users to select their own collection of applications and unlock personalised digital experiences. They can be used to consolidate multiple mobile apps or related services to improve customer experience. As such, it’s likely that by 2027, more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps, according to Gartner. - Adaptive AI for Value Acceleration
Adaptive AI utilises real-time feedback to enable models to continue to learn and adapt within runtime and development environments, based on applying graph analytics. This accelerates the response to changing environments, continuously adds new training data, and transforms the results from general to more personalised.
Adaptive AI systems require processes to be reengineered for automated decision-making. However, the successful introduction of adaptive AI will allow organisations to rapidly respond to unforeseen shifts in real-world circumstances. This, in turn, will be crucial to achieving organisational agility and accelerating value realisation from AI-enabled initiatives. - Seizing Opportunities With Metaverse
Gartner defines a metaverse as “a collective virtual 3D shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. A metaverse is persistent, providing enhanced immersive experiences.” It’s expected that a complete metaverse won’t be owned by a single vendor and will be device-independent. Gartner’s researchers predict that over 40% of large organisations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, spatial computing, and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue by 2027.
When it comes to investing in metaverse technologies (e.g., spatial computing, digital humans, and virtual spaces) today, Gartner recommends caution as it’s still too early to determine how viable such investments will be in the long term. However, the metaverse presents opportunities in areas such as customer service (e.g., with chatbots and avatars), gamification in learning, and augmented reality in sales. Companies contemplating joining the metaverse hype should approach it strategically and invest in areas that will bring them value right now.
Final Thoughts
Gartner’s top 10 tech trends for 2023 align with the company’s strategic predictions for the coming years, which are centred on uncertainty. While social and economic volatility presents many risks to businesses worldwide, it may also be a source of new opportunities. Your approach to tackling or embracing uncertainty must be linked to your business goals, and the presented technology trends provide means of addressing them. The key to success is achieving organisational agility and resilience with sustainability goals pervading all optimisation, scaling, and pioneering efforts.
References
- Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023, Gartner, 2022
- Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2023 and Beyond — Seizing Uncertainty, Gartner, 2022
She specialises in translation, writing and knowledge management. In her work, she combines her passion for languages with an interest in technology. Privately, she was part of a team of volunteers responsible for the Polish translation of “Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear” video game.
