Smart machine technologies to be most disruptive over next decade, says Gartner

The Hype Cycle highlights the trends likely to be ‘of the highest priority for organisations facing rapidly accelerating digital business innovation'. 

According to Gartner, technology will continue to become more human-centric to the point where it will ‘introduce transparency between people, businesses and things'. It anticipates that this relationship will become much  more entwined as the evolution of technology becomes more adaptive, contextual and fluid within the workplace. 

The second trend highlighted by Gartner – the perceptual smart machine age – suggests that smart machine technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years as a result of radical computational power, ‘near-endless amounts of data', and unprecedented advances in deep neural networks . This, says Gartner, will allow organisations with smart machine technologies to harness data in order to adapt to new situations and solve problems that haven't previously been encountered. 

Lastly, the platform revolution refers to the shift from technical infrastructure to ecosystem-enabling platforms and how it is laying the foundations for entirely new business models that are ‘forming the bridge between humans and technology'. 

"These trends illustrate that the more organisations are able to make technology an integral part of their employees', partners’ and customers’ experience, the more they will be able to connect their ecosystems to platforms in new and dynamic ways," said Mike Walker, research director at Gartner.

"Also, as smart machine technologies continue to evolve, they will become part of the human experience and the digital business ecosystem."