The top emerging and disruptive technologies to watch

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Scoping the technology landscape is growing as a priority — for both tech product makers, vendors and enterprise users — amid the continuing hype about generative AI. 

The Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar shows when emerging technologies are expected to have a significant impact on the market and how big that impact is likely to be. Each of the 30 technologies and trends on the 2024 radar falls into one of four themes: 

1. Smart world
2. Productivity revolution
3. Privacy and transparency
4. Critical enablers

Use the emerging tech impact radar to plan your investments and support business strategy.

Tuong Nguyen , Gartner Director Analyst

Theme 1: Smart world

This theme covers the changes in how we interact with people, places, content and things based on the convergence of online and offline experiences. For example:

• AI avatars are human-like virtual personas created using computer-generated imagery and various AI techniques and applications.
• Digital twins are technology-enabled proxies that generate a digital representation by mirroring the state of a single or collection of physical or virtual assets, processes, persons or organizations.
• See more technologies that fit into the smart world.

Theme 2: Productivity revolution

This theme highlights the potential productivity of GenAI, which is largely driving its widespread adoption across the enterprise. For example:

• Model compression is a set of techniques that reduces the size of a trained neural network for deployment on small devices or to increase a central system’s capacity.
• Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are autonomous flying machines, mostly used for asset inspection, but also starting to gain traction to help deliver small packages.
• See more technologies that fall under the productivity revolution.

Theme 3: Privacy and transparency

This theme focuses on making the right business and ethical choices in the adoption of AI and using AI design principles that will benefit people and society. For example:

• Human-centered AI (HCAI) is a common AI design principle that calls for AI to continuously benefit from human input.
• Behavioral analytics refers to session-tracking capabilities that monitor user interactions with a protected service to build trust models for distinguishing fraudsters, trusted users and bots.
• See more technologies that fit into privacy and transparency.

Theme 4: Critical enablers

This theme centers on expectations for emerging applications — some of which will enable new use cases and others that will enhance existing experiences — to guide which technologies to evaluate and where to invest. For example: 

• Neuromorphic computing is an engineering approach in which components of a computer are designed to mimic the functions of systems in the human brain and nervous system.
• Tokenization is a cryptographically secured representation of value or data.
• See more technologies that fall under critical enablers.

Gartner recommends that when integrating emerging technologies and trends into products and services, you:

1. Use them to enhance your competitive edge in the smart world, where online and offline experiences converge.
2. Prioritize prevalent and impactful generative AI (GenAI) use cases that already deliver real value to users.
3. Balance stimulating growth and mitigating risk.
4. Identify relevant emerging technologies and business benefits that support your strategic product roadmap.

Get AI Ready — What IT Leaders Need to Know and Do

Business users of generative AI also face urgent demands for GenAI capabilities and few organizations have done the preparatory work needed to succeed in their use. 

More than 60% of CIOs say AI, including GenAI, is part of their innovation plan, yet fewer than half feel the organization can manage its risks. Many others lack the data or governance mechanism required for success.  

Download our guide, which helps IT leaders ready their organization to:

• Define their “AI ambition” and spot AI opportunities
• Prepare AI cybersecurity
• Make data AI-ready
• Adopt AI principles

Top Tech Trends, Unpacked Video Series

In this Gartner original series, we explore, explain and demystify other trends — the 10 strategic technology trends that will have the biggest impact on driving business value over the coming years.

More Resources:

• Download Now: The Tech Product Leader's Guide to Emerging Technologies and Trends
• Download Now: Technology Adoption Roadmap
• Download Now: 2024 Technology Adoption Roadmap for Security and Risk Management
• Download Now: 2024 Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises
• Download Now: 2024 Technology Adoption Roadmap for Infrastructure and Operations
• Watch Webinar: The Business Value and Benefits of Web3, Blockchain and NFTs
• Watch Webinar: Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar: 4 Most Critical Themes for Product Leaders 
• Watch Webinar: The 5 Technologies That Will Transform Your Digital Future