Every year, leading technological research and consulting firm Gartner releases its top strategic technology trends. These trends are expected to factor into many decisions and strategies in the realms of business, technology, and digital transformation. In this article, we’ll discuss the top trends for 2024 on Gartner’s list.
We will also take a more in-depth look at platform engineering, a trend that accelerates business value, reduces cognitive loads, and gives developers and organizations the opportunity to run, develop and manage their own applications and processes.
1. AI TRiSM
AI TRiSM is a contraction of AI Trust and risk and security management. This model supports AI model governance, fairness, reliability, robustness, transparency, and data protection by combining content anomaly detection, data protection, application security, model management, and adversarial resistance.
The results of this strategic approach? Improved model precision and consistency, but also enhanced bias control in decision and more fairness in AI-driven applications. By 2026, enterprises that apply TRiSM controls to AI applications will likely increase the accuracy of their decision-making by eliminating 80% of faulty and illegitimate information.
2. Continuous threat exposure management
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) presents a pragmatic and systemic approach to cybersecurity optimization. CTEM provides an excellent balance between diagnosis and action. It includes scoping, discovery, prioritization (identifying which threats matter most), validation, and mobilization (taking the proper measures to battle a threat or minimize its impact).
This comprehensive approach to security aligns exposure assessment cycles with specific business projects or critical threat vectors, addresses patchable and unpatchable exposures, and facilitates evidence-based security optimizations.
3. Sustainable technology
Sustainability is a top priority for most modern organizations. Sustainable technologies can aid in meeting environmental, social and governmental (ESG) improvement goals that support long-term ecological balance and human rights. Gartner expects that more and more organizations will increasingly select technologies that will help drive sustainability in their industry and are identified as a priority for the business and key stakeholders. By 2027, 25% of CIOs will have compensation linked to their sustainable technology impact, says Gartner.
4. Platform engineering
Platform engineering is another top trend in 2024 and beyond. Gartner predicts that by 2026, approximately 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery. Well-designed platforms have the potential to offer customers and business partners a frictionless self-service experience, allowing users to do valuable work with as little overhead as possible.
The benefits of proper platform engineering are manyfold. The practice allows you to reduce cognitive load, improve the developer experience and productivity, and give users more independence through advanced self-service options. Building platforms with reusable, composable and configurable platform components, knowledge and services also increases the flexibility and adaptability of your organization.
5. AI-augmented development
Advanced AI technologies, such as generative AI and machine learning, are becoming an ever more important part of the process of creating, testing and delivering applications and platforms. According to Gartner, in 2028 about 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants.
AI-augmented development tools allow you to translate legacy code to modern languages, enable design-to-code transformation, and enhance application testing capabilities. They also improve developer productivity (developers spend less time writing code and can focus on higher-level activities) and enable development teams to address the increasing demand for business-critical software solutions.
6. Industry cloud platforms
Industry cloud platforms (ICPs) are tailored cloud proposals specific to your industry. They offer the composability that modern organizations need to respond to accelerating disruptions in their industry. By 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will probably use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives. This number is up from less than 15% in 2023.
7. Intelligent applications
Intelligence is rapidly becoming a foundational capacity for modern applications. Intelligent, mostly AI-augmented applications are an important trend because they allow organizations to better automate and augment work across an incredibly broad range of use cases. Transforming the experience of users, customers and product owners, adding accurate predictions and recommendations, and advance data-driven decision-making: intelligent apps make it possible.
8. Democratized generative AI
Democratized generative AI is another major trend, mainly because the widespread availability of generative AI is bound to democratize access to information and skills. Vast sources of information – both internal and external – can be made accessible and available to business users via natural language conversational interfaces, allowing organizations to boost productivity, reduce costs, and create and utilize new opportunities for growth.
Gartner expects that by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs, models and/or deployed generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, an increase from fewer than 5% today.
9. Augmented connected workforce
The ninth trend on our list is the augmented connected workforce. This strategy allows you to optimize human performance by establishing a connective tissue that optimizes the use of intelligent technology. Augmented connected workforces enable you to work smarter and tackle complex issues through smart workplace automation. “Through 2027, 25% of CIOs will use augmented connected workforce initiatives to reduce time to competency by 50% for key roles”, says Gartner.
10. Machine customers
The last trend on Gartner’s list is both an interesting and disruptive one. For the first time in history, companies will be able to ‘make’ their own customers. Connected products (approximately 28 billion in 2028) have the potential to behave as customers and will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030. In the long run, machine customers might render 20% of human-readable digital storefronts obsolete.
Driving Efficiency with Be Informed in Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is a particularly important trend because it can accelerate the delivery of applications and significantly increase the pace at which they produce business value. Be Informed recognizes this and was founded to meet the rising need of organizations to automate complex, knowledge-intensive work.
This resulted in the creation of our model-based intelligent automation platform. The use of declarative models and advanced goal-oriented, backward-chaining inferences to automate decisions, supports decision-makers and generates contextual processes according to the rules specific to a particular situation.
The model-driven character of the Be Informed platform accelerates development greatly and is less labor-intensive than traditional approaches. Solid, open integration solutions make the platform highly scalable, integrable, future-proof, and capable of handling all levels of complexity. Continuous development is also one of the principles that Be Informed adheres to. This means that we are constantly busy improving and optimizing the platform to create an even better development and user experience.
Geert Rensen
Director Business Development
g.rensen@beinformed.com
