These technologies are expected to greatly impact business and society over the next two to 10 years, but will especially enable CIOs and IT leaders to deliver on digital business transformation.
Emerging technologies are disruptive by nature, without a well-known or proven competitive advantage. To capture the opportunities, it’s critical to understand the potential use cases and the technologies’ paths to mainstream adoption — which can be as little as two years or as long as 10 years or more.
“All these technologies are at an early stage, but some are at an embryonic stage, and great uncertainty exists about how they will evolve. The embryonic technologies present greater risks for deployment but potentially greater benefits for early adopters, which differentiates them from Gartner’s top strategic technology trends,” says Melissa Davis, VP Analyst at Gartner.
Three Hype Cycle themes to think about in 2022 and beyond
The 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle features emerging technologies and distills insights from more than 2,000 technologies into a succinct high-potential set. Most technologies have multiple use cases but enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders should prioritize those with the greatest potential benefit for their organization. (They will also need to launch a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate the feasibility of a technology for their target use case.)
Theme 1: Evolving/expanding immersive experiences
The benefit of these technologies is that they provide individuals with more control over their identities and data, and expand their range of experiences into virtual venues and ecosystems that can be integrated with digital currencies. These technologies also provide new ways to reach customers to strengthen or open up new revenue streams.
Digital twin of the customer (DToC) is a dynamic virtual representation of a customer that simulates and learns to emulate and anticipate behavior. It can be used to modify and enhance the customer experience (CX) and support new digitalization efforts, products, services and opportunities. DToC will take five to 10 years until mainstream adoption but will be transformational to organizations.
Other critical technologies in immersive experiences include the following:
- Decentralized identity (DCI) allows an entity (typically a human user) to control their own digital identity by leveraging technologies such as blockchain or other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), along with digital wallets.
- Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that have some of the characteristics, personality, knowledge and mindset of a human.
- Internal talent marketplaces match internal employees and, in some cases, a pool of contingent workers, to time-boxed projects and various work opportunities, with no recruiter involvement.
- Metaverse is 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.
- Non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique programmable blockchain-based digital item that publicly proves ownership of digital assets, such as digital art or music, or physical assets that are tokenized, such as houses, cars or documents.
- Superapp is a composite mobile app built as a platform to deliver modular microapps that users can activate for personalized app experiences.
- Web3 is a new stack of technologies for the development of decentralized web applications that enable users to control their own identity and data.
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