Gartner: The Top 10 Technology Trends for 2023

The market research institute Gartner has presented the top 10 technology trends for 2023. This year’s focus: defence against cybercrime and the right way to utilise artificial intelligence (AI) for a company’s success. How companies can successfully make data-driven decisions and how industry cloud platforms can help improve scalability is the subject of today’s Handelskraft article.

Tech Trends for 2023

1. Tech trends to optimise your systems
2. Tech trends for better scalability
3. Tech trends for pioneering achievements

Garter Tech Trends to Optimise Your Systems

Nowadays, almost all fields of business are digitalised. The next step is to utilise these technologies in a meaningful way in order to unleash their full potential. To do this, systems must be developed further and optimised. One important advantage of new solutions is that companies can make better decisions based on a wealth of data.

However, more data also makes companies more vulnerable to attacks from the outside, which is why data protection plays a vital role in the optimisation process. For this reason, consistent improvement is necessary across all fields to enable companies to make decisions based on valid data. The more well structured and up to date data sets are, the more significant they will be.

1. Digital Immune Systems

It is impossible to imagine the business world without digitalisation and the countless new opportunities it offers companies. However, this dependence on data carries risks with it. Threats posed by cybercrime and data leaks are growing and compromising the stability of companies’ systems. A digital immune system can help protect companies from attacks and other security threats of this kind. Furthermore, these systems can fix bugs and other errors that occur without criminal intent more quickly and get systems back up and running.

According to Gartner, a digital immune system can vastly improve resilience and reduce system downtime by up to 80 per cent. In today’s digitally driven business environment, strong resilience is directly linked to a company’s profitability.

2. Applied Observability

Applied observability helps your company make faster and more precise decisions in the future. AI technology analyses your organisation’s existing data and uses it to make recommendations. This allows your company to monitor and improve operations almost in real time and implement optimised feedback loops.

3. AI TRiSM

AI TRiSM (Trust, Risk & Security Management) is a framework that attempts to explain the decisions of AI systems through different methods. Instead of simply accepting the output offered by AI, it examines the thought processes behind these decisions. By looking at the training data, companies can gain a better understanding of how their AI systems work and validate their results.

This approach aims to ensure the integrity and accountability of AI systems and helps secure reliable and trustworthy results. This plays a role in promoting a sense of responsibility and ethics during development as well as in the application of AI. It allows companies to mitigate the risk of AI creating inaccurate content or content that is incompatible with their business, enabling them to address their customers in a more targeted way.

Garter Tech Trends for Better Scalability

Now that your company’s systems are optimised, the following three trends will help improve their scalability. With these trends, your company can engage in vertical scaling, thus increasing your number of customers, strengthening your competitive position and shortening your time to market.

4. Industry Cloud Platforms

Industry clouds are specialised platforms that have been developed for companies in specific industries. They offer a multitude of tools and solutions specifically tailored to the requirements of the industry. This can help your company optimise processes, lower costs and respond to changes in a more agile way. SaaS, PaaS and IaaS are combined, and the platforms make use of composable modules to offer companies time-sensitive and differentiated solutions for almost every area of application.

5. Platform Technology

Platform technology is designed to relieve your developers and counteract issues in the development and deployment of software. The technology also speeds up software delivery, which can create competitive advantages and enable scaling. To do so, these platforms provide various tools, such as a library of reusable software components.

Similarly, a self-service developer portal can help eliminate potential problem areas between the development team and the increasingly complex infrastructure in a scaling enterprise. However, this requires a dedicated team for the maintenance of the development platform.

6. Wireless Value Realisation

According to Gartner, the average company will simultaneously monitor and administer up to five different wireless networks in the future. To fully realise the potential of these networks, a comprehensive integration into the existing infrastructure will be necessary. This includes not only the standard connection of company PCs, but also the use of digital tagging solutions, for example in merchandise or supply chain management. Such near-field and low-power solutions are also becoming increasingly relevant in the context of business IoT in other fields of application. According to Gartner, such solutions will correlate directly with company value in the future.

Gartner Tech Trends for Pioneering Achievements

A pioneering achievement – gaining a completely new insight in a new field – is a breakthrough for any company. The following trends will help your company make a complete change in the context of such an achievement, opening up new avenues towards digitalisation and driving development. Likewise, such a pioneering position offers the chance to build a reputation as an innovator.

7. Super Apps

Super apps combine the functionalities of apps, platforms and ecosystems in a single application. They offer a wide range of features and services, thereby replacing the need for multiple apps. Super apps have become increasingly popular in recent years and are already an integral tool for daily interaction in some countries.

A noticeable trend is the integration of e-commerce features, which allow users to purchase and pay for goods and services directly in the app. Super apps also serve as a platform for third parties to develop mini apps that can be integrated into the super app. In doing so, they share data with the mini app developers. Gartner estimates that the 15 largest super apps share a combined 2.6 billion users.

The large number of existing users on these super apps enables companies to launch products faster and more cost effectively. Additionally, the concentration of activity in a single app makes user behaviour easy to analyse and facilitates the tailoring of advertisements to a target group.

8. Adaptive AI

AI needs to be trained and supplied with a large amount of information. Consequently, it can only ever be as up to date as the data it has received. The adaptive AI approach aims to counteract this issue.

Adaptive AI uses feedback in real time to continuously adapt to its environment and can even change its basic learning model. It can learn new patterns and behaviours, even without being explicitly programmed to do so. In a digitalising world, it will become an increasingly important tool to help businesses adapt to a changing environment and prevent generalised AI results.

9. Metaverse

The metaverse is a virtual world in which people can interact and communicate with each other. It is comprised of virtual spaces as well as digital goods and services. Companies have the opportunity to develop new business models and further expand their portfolio in the metaverse. They can also use certain aspects of gamification to provide customers with a completely new experience and market products virtually.

According to Gartner, it is essential for companies to invest in certain components of the metaverse. Nevertheless, long-term developments should be viewed cautiously.

10. Sustainable Technology

Optimisation, scalability and pioneering achievements all have a sustainability aspect to them. This includes a multitude of solutions designed to increase the efficiency of IT offerings.

Technologies used as part of the wireless value realisation approach can help build up systems within an organisation to meet sustainability requirements. This can be achieved, for example, through the traceability of goods and an efficient supply chain supported by AI. However, during the development of AI, it needs to be trained accordingly to understand under which conditions it should and may act with regard to sustainability. Only if AI is given a clear scope of action with requirements can it behave in the intended sense of sustainability.