My take on Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Trends for 2019..

Photo by Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash

Category #1 Intelligence

1. Autonomous Things – Gartner predicts that autonomous things – intelligent combinations of software & hardware – such as robotics, vehicles, drones and appliances or agents. There is not much to disagree here. These ’things’ have begun impacting industries as diverse as Retail eCommerce, Oil & Gas, Public Transportation, etc. Expect this to be a hotbed of innovation in 2019
2. Augmented Analytics – Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make its way into more and more business processes ranging from the front office (Customer facing) to the back office (Operations focused). The focus of AI will be to be non-intrusive while augmenting the function of applications while providing value-added analytic insights to employees who can be citizen data scientists. There are a range of startups in this area, expect this to emerge over the medium term – 3-5 years
3. AI-driven development – This is the notion that AI-driven bots can drive the full cycle of software development – dev, test, modeling, etc. We are probably at least a decade away from this trend becoming evident as these kinds of capabilities are just not there

Category #2 Digital

1. Digital Twin – A Digital twin is a software personification of an intelligent device or system. In the manufacturing industry, digital twins can be setup to function as proxies of things like sensors and gauges, Coordinate Measuring Machines, lasers, vision systems, and white light scanning. The wealth of data being gathered on the shop floor will ensure that Digital twins will be used to reduce costs and increase innovation. Data science will soon make it’s way into the shop floor to enable the collection of insights from these software proxies. This trend is still emerging in 2019 and will be another decade before Digital twins are widely deployed.
2. Empowered Edge – Regular readers of this blog will remember posts where we discussed the ‘Digital Mesh’ which leads to an interconnected network of classical IoT endpoints along with audio, video & social data streams that interact with users using compute & analytics at the ‘edge’ rather than the core ‘ datacenter’. This a reality in 2019. Please see my comment from last year’s review- “The creation of these smart edge services will further depend on the vertical industries that these products serve as well as requirements for the platforms that host them. E.g industrial automation, remote healthcare, public transportation, connected cars, home automation, etc.“
3. Immersive experience – Three technologies underpin the experience humans will encounter interacting with services and products on the Digital Mesh – Virtual reality (VR), Conversational AI and Augmented Reality (AR). Uses of these technologies will include gamification (to improve customer engagement with products and services), other customer & employee-facing applications, etc. While both these technologies enable us to view the world in different ways – AR is remarkable in its ability to add to our current reality.  This one is still on the drawing board for most verticals but it does make sense to invest in areas like gamification and in engaging with remote employees using AR.

Category #3 Mesh

1. Blockchain –  Blockchain is a distributed ledger (DLT) which allows global participants to conduct secure transactions that could be of any type – banking, music purchases, legal contracts, supply chain transactions etc. Blockchain will transform multiple industries in the medium term. Bitcoin and other cyber currencies are the first application of Blockchain. This is a real and clear trend that saw lots of action so far in 2019. Industry CIOs need to begin POCs on innovative applications for the blockchain that can potentially augment or disrupt your vertical industry.
2. Smart Spaces – Couple AI with massive data processing capabilities and Intelligent Things which interact with humans in new ways, you have the notion of Smart Spaces such as Smart Cities. You can add a whole category of things around transportation (self-driving cars, connected cars) and Robotics. While this trend is at least a decade away in my opinion, these intelligent devices will increasingly communicate collaboratively with their environments & users in a manner that will encourage collaboration in a range of business scenarios.

1. Privacy and Ethics – With the social media controversies around the 2016 presidential election as well as legislation such as the GDPR, data protection, and ethics have taken center stage. Across all of the above capabilities, personal information needs to be protected as a basic human right. This may seem obvious but both governments and enterprises will need to take steps to protect data privacy while trading it off with convenience and technological progress.
2. Quantum Computing – The hope is that Quantum Computing techniques that combine math and topology will become mainstream in 2019. This will lead to the ability of computers to crunch exponential datasets, billions of data points in parallel thus solving problems leading to increased industry productivity. While I am no expert in Quantum computing this does seem a far fetched prediction as I haven’t heard of many vendors making computers that leverage these computations.

   
   Conclusion…