AI is the most hyped technology of 2023

There is little surprise that Gartner’s latest research on emerging technology shows that generative AI is reaching a peak in hype.

“The popularity of many new AI techniques will have a profound impact on business and society,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner. “The massive pretraining and scale of AI foundation models, viral adoption of conversational agents and the proliferation of generative AI applications are heralding a new wave of workforce productivity and machine creativity.”

Beyond generative AI, Gartner identified a number of emerging AI techniques, which offer businesses the potential to boost digital customer experiences, make better business decisions and build sustainable competitive differentiation. These include AI simulation, causal AI, federated machine learning, graph data science, neuro-symbolic AI and reinforcement learning.

Along with AI, Gartner analysts identified three further areas of emerging technology CIOs should start looking at.

The first of these is human-centric security and privacy. As Gartner points out, human error is the chief cause of security incidents and data breaches. Gartner defines a human-centric security and privacy programme as one that weaves a security and privacy fabric into the organisation’s digital design.

“Numerous emerging technologies are enabling businesses to create a culture of mutual trust and awareness of shared risks in decision making between many teams,” Gartner said.

The list of emerging tech identified by Gartner that help to achieve human-centric security and privacy technologies include AI trust, risk and security management; cyber security mesh architecture; generative cyber security AI; homomorphic encryption; and post-quantum cryptography.

Developer experience (DevX) is the second area CIOs should be building up, according to Gartner. The analyst firm said DevX is critical for most enterprises’ digital initiative success. Key technologies that are enhancing DevX include AI-augmented software engineering, API-centric SaaS, GitOps, internal developer portals, open source programme office and value stream management platforms.

Gartner pointed out that DevX is also vital for attracting and retaining top engineering talent, keeping team morale high and ensuring that work is motivating and rewarding.

Pervasive cloud is the third emerging area of IT identified in Gartner Hype cycle for emerging technologies 2023 report. Gartner believes that over the next 10 year, cloud computing will evolve into a pervasive and an essential driver of business innovation. To enable this pervasive adoption, cloud computing is becoming more distributed and, if Gartner’s assumptions are correct, will be focused on vertical industries.

The analyst firm recommended that CIOs implement automated operational scaling, offer their team access to cloud-native platform tools, and provide adequate governance to maximise value from cloud investments.

Melissa Davis, vice-president analyst at Gartner, said: “As the technologies in this hype cycle are still at an early stage, there is significant uncertainty about how they will evolve. Such embryonic technologies present greater risks for deployment, but potentially greater benefits for early adopters.”