During the Gartner IT Symposium or Xpo, analysts in the technology sphere presented their findings. Now Gartner is highlighting the top strategic IT trends that companies will need to sample out in 2020. Gartner gives a definition of what a “strategic technology trend” is by saying that it’s one that has substantial potential to disrupt the existing technologies and is now moving away from being called an emerging technology into joining the pool of the technologies that are said to have a broader impact as well as use. It’s a technology that is rapidly growing and expected to reach its tipping points within the next few years owing to its high degree of volatility. As a blockchain development team, you need to be aware of these technologies and how they will impact the app development processes.

You have seen technologies like AI security, blockchain, hyper-automation, autonomous things, and distributed cloud propel disruption and bring in opportunities in the various business environments. These technologies have featured in the 2019 strategic technology trends.

Augmentation in humans does magic tricks in creating visions of futuristic cyborgs, however, humans have a long history of augmenting their bodies for centuries. Things like prosthetics, hearing aids, and other gadgets transformed into cochlear implants or even wearables. Today laser eye surgeries are highly common. That shows how humans have made strides in technological developments, especially when it comes to augmenting body parts. What about if scientists are able to augment the human brain to boost its memory storage or implant chips that can help decode neural patterns?

Think of a situation where exoskeletons could be used in autoworkers to allow them to lift extraordinary weights or if doctors can implant sensors that help track the way drugs travel in human bodies? Today, technology is going behind augmentation that just replaces the capability of humans into augmentation that builds superhuman capabilities.

Regardless of how these technological changes are going to change the business, we see that human augmentation a top Gartner’s pick among the strategic technology trends likely to propel significant disruption as well as opportunities over the next years. When you look at these future technologies, you find that they are pegged upon people-centric smart spaces. This means the technologies will affect the way people (referring to employees and customers) and the environments they interact with (referring to homes, cars, and offices) are going to relate.

Gartner Research VP Brian Burke said during the Gartner 2019 IT Xpo in Orlando that these trends have a big potential for impacting on people and the environments or spaces they inhabit. Organizations will need to consider things like the business and human interactions when building technologies rather than having technology stack where they have to build it then begin to explore what kind of potentials it has in real-life applications.

Technologies like AI that incorporates machine learning, when coupled with others like edge computing and hyper-automation, they can be able to bring up highly integrated smart structures like buildings and city spaces. What we are seeing is that combining these technologies can allow democratization in technology, which can also be used by a blockchain development company to help with the process of developing apps.

So, what are the top 10 strategic technology trend picks for Gartner that organizations should be eyeing for exploring in 2020?

1. Multiexperience

When it comes to technology-literate individuals, multi-experience will replace them with people-literate technology. You will see the traditional compute evolving from a one-point of interaction to take a multi-touchpoint and multisensory interfaces such as advanced computer sensors and wearables. A good example is a case where Domino’s Pizza brought up an experience that is beyond the app-based ordering of Pizzas which includes a pizza tracker, autonomous vehicles, and smart speaker communication.

It is projected that this trend is going to become an ambient experience. Currently, multi-experience dwells on immersive experiences utilizing augmented reality and other technologies like virtual reality, mixed reality, as well as a multichannel human-machine interface or even sensing technologies. These technologies can be combined to create a simple augmented reality overlay or create a fully immersive virtual reality experience.

2. Hyperautomation

Technological advancements allow automation to be used to automate tasks that previously needed the work of humans. Hyperautomation involves the application of high-tech tools like artificial intelligence as well as machine learning in order to enhance the process of automation and augment humans. This technology is used in a wide range of tools that are automatable. It also involves sophisticating the automation – for example, making it discover, design, analyze, automate, monitor, measure, and reassess or re-evaluate.

Since there is no single technology or tool that is capable of replacing humans, you find that hyper-automation in the modern world entails combining tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent business management software (iBPMS) with the aim of having a decision-making process that is driven by artificial intelligence.

Often, hyper-automation leads to the development of an organization’s digital twin (DTO) that allows organizations to be able to conceptualize and visualize how processes, functions, and key performance indicators (KPIs) interact to bring value. For instance, a blockchain developer can conceptualize and visualize the app development process and how the clients and users relate to the development process. An organizational digital twin is a key component of the hyper-automation process that is able to provide real-time, continuous intelligence regarding an organization and propelling business opportunities.

3. Distributed Cloud

When you distribute the public cloud services to areas that are outside the physical data centers of the cloud providers, it is called distributed cloud. However, those cloud services still remain under the control of the providers. The cloud provider takes care of all elements of cloud service delivery, architecture, operations, updates, and governance in distributed cloud. Cloud computing is going to get into a new era with the move to distributed public cloud from centralized public cloud.

Distributed cloud creates an environment where data centers are located anywhere which means issues like latency and regulatory challenges such as data sovereignty will be solved. Distributed cloud provides the benefits of a local, private cloud and a public cloud service.

4. Technological Democracy

When referring to the democratization of technology, it means providing individuals with easy access to technical as well as business expertise without incurring huge costs of training. Technology democracy involves four key areas which are data and analytics, application development, knowledge, and design. Democratization of technology is often called citizen access which as result has led to the creation of more citizen programmers and citizen data scientists among others.

For instance, democratization could allow developers to produce data models without the need to have data scientist skills. The developers would rely on development that is driven by artificial intelligence to be able to generate code and then automate the testing process.

5. Empowered Edge

To help reduce latency, edge computing is applied. This is a topology in which information process, as well as data collection and delivery, are put nearer to the information source so that the traffic is kept local and distributed thus resulting in reduced latency. Internet of Things technology is included in empowered edge computing. With empowered edge, it examines how the Internet of Things devices are heightening and forming the grounds for smart spaces. It moves important services and applications nearer to the audiences or people as well as the devices that use those applications and services. It is projected that by 2023, smart devices would be 20 times more at the edge of networks than it is today.

6. Autonomous Things

You have seen things like drones, ships, appliances, and robots use artificial intelligence to attempt tasks that were usually done by humans. Autonomous Things is a technology that takes in different intelligence technologies such as fully autonomous or semiautonomous and in different environments like land, sea, and air.

Presently, Autonomous Things technology is found in controlled environments such as in warehouses and mines. However, it is expected to evolve into public spaces. The technology is going to get away from the stand-alone status to collaborative swarms as you have seen with drone swarms that were used in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. When it comes to Autonomous Things, the technology isn’t able to replace human brains. It operates within a narrowly defined purpose.

7. Human Augmentation

The use of technology to boost the physical and cognitive capabilities of a person is what is known as human augmentation. With physical augmentation, it is able to change the physical capability of a human by hosting or implanting a technology on or within the body. For instance, mining industries and automotive sectors use wearables in improving worker safety.

In the travel and retail industries, wearables are utilized to enhance worker productivity.

There are four categories in physical augmentation and they are sensory augmentation that involves vision, hearing, and reception as well as biological and appendage augmentation which involves prosthetics and exoskeletons. There is also the brain augmentation that involves implants for treating seizures and last there is the genetic augmentation that involves somatic gene as well as cell therapy.

In place of people, you see that artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are used in making decisions.

Cognitive augmentation is used to enhance the ability of humans to think as well as make better decisions. Humans can exploit information and application so that they enhance learning and new experiences. This augmentation also entails technologies used in brain augmentation since physical implants are the ones that help with cognitive reasoning. That being said, there are ethical implications when it comes to applications of these technologies in human augmentation. For example, the CRISPR technologies used to augment genes have received a lot of ethical effects.

8. Traceability and Transparency

With all the positives about technology, one area that is failing is in trust. Technology evolution creates a trust crisis. Today, consumers are becoming more aware of the way the data which companies pick from them including their personal information is being used. Also, organizations are realizing that they have a huge liability when they store and gather the data of customers.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used to replace the human decision-making process which means that the trust of the organization from customers is dwindling. There is a need to have explainable artificial intelligence and artificial governance. The transparency and traceability trend needs to focus on elements of trust which are integrity, ethics, accountability, openness, consistency, and competence.

The ground rules for businesses and other organization regarding the use of these technologies is being set around the world with legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is implemented in the European Union.

9. AI Security

Artificial intelligence security will emphasize on protecting systems that are powered by artificial intelligence. It will also focus on leveraging artificial intelligence so that it enhances security defense, for example, using machine learning to be able to understand the patterns and uncover attacks while also being able to automate some of the cybersecurity processes. The evolving technologies like autonomous things and hyper-automation have brought many opportunities in the business environment, however, these technologies have also created security vulnerabilities that can best be addressed if artificial intelligence is incorporated in the sphere of cybersecurity. AI security will anticipate malicious use of artificial security by attackers – for example, by identifying attacks as well as defending against them.

10. Practical Blockchain

The ability to allow parties to trace the origin of assets has been facilitated by the technology called Blockchain. This technology could also be used in other ways like tracing the original supplier of food-borne illnesses. Blockchain allows parties who are not conversant with each other to be able to interact safely via digital environments and exchange value without needing to have a centralized authority.

There are five elements in the blockchain model which are:

• Encryption
• Shared and distributed ledger
• Tokenization
• Immutable and traceable ledger
• Distributed public consensus

Although a promising technology, blockchain has remained immature for deploying to the enterprise environment because of the technical issues involved including poor interoperability and scalability.

Conclusion

By 2023, it is expected that blockchain, which is now being deployed in small-scope projects, will be completely scalable. Today enterprise blockchain takes a practical approach whereby it implements only certain elements of the entire blockchain model. In the future, blockchain complete or true blockchain is going to have great transformations in industries and the economy as complementing technologies like the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are integrated into blockchain. This could see developments like machines being able to exchange assets, for example, a car would negotiate insurance prices with the company based upon the data it has gathered with its sensors. You can hire a blockchain developer to start reaping the benefits of this technology in your business.