Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2024

• These innovations can drive you faster toward your business goals, especially in the fast-evolving age of AI.
• Purposefully integrate a select few to help build and protect your digital organization while generating value.

Big Picture

These strategic technology trends will factor into business and technology decisions over the next three years

Gartner urges you to evaluate the impacts and benefits of each of these technology trends to determine which innovation — or strategic combination — will have the most significant impact on your organization’s success.

1. AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)
2. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
3. Sustainable Technology
4. Platform Engineering
5. AI-Augmented Development
6. Industry Cloud Platforms
7. Intelligent Applications
8. Democratized Generative AI
9. Augmented Connected Workforce
10. Machine Customers

Each of the trends relates to one or more key themes for business: protecting and preserving past and future investments, building the right solutions for the right stakeholders at the right time, and delivering value for the changing environment of both internal and external customers.

Theme 1: Protect your investment

• To ensure sustained impact from your technology investments, be:
  • Deliberate. Stop all uncontrolled experimentation with insufficient direction. Efforts should be intentional and produce sound results for daily use.
  • Realistic. Calculate the ROI of projects by factoring in the necessary protective measures from the start.
  • Forward-looking. Tailor innovations with reuse in mind while securing your rights (i.e., intellectual property and ownership of creations) and a durable position in the future.
• The IT trends that fall into this category are:
  • AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)
  • Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
  • Industry Cloud Platforms
  • Sustainable Technology
  • Democratized Generative AI

By 2026, generative AI will significantly alter 70% of the design and development effort for new web applications and mobile apps.

Theme 2: Rise of the builders

• Unleash the creative powers of the myriad communities that build applications and solutions by:
  • Using technology that fits your industry, specific organizational needs and specialist workers.
  • Developing your roadmap to enable nonspecialists to create.
  • Working closely with business stakeholders to determine software delivery and portfolio life cycle management.
• The IT trends that fall into this theme are:
  • Platform Engineering
  • AI-Augmented Development
  • Industry Cloud Platforms
  • Intelligent Applications
  • Sustainable Technology
  • Democratized Generative AI

By 2027, 80% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.

Theme 3: Deliver the value

• Refine and accelerate how you improve experience for stakeholders, and expand your options for driving revenue by:
  • Continuously adjusting to changing internal and external customer demands to create a virtuous cycle of value determination and delivery.
  • Including approaches for algorithm-based customers, whose influence is rapidly growing.
  • Facilitating controlled access to quickly evolving digital tools, whether they relate to generative AI, workforce skilling and migration, or other opportunities for augmentation and automation.
• The IT trends that fall into this theme are:
  • Machine Customers
  • Augmented Connected Workforce
  • Intelligent Applications
  • Sustainable Technology
  • Democratized Generative AI

How to use these technologies to achieve your CEO’s and CIO’s goals for 2024 and beyond

• Examine the trends’ potential relative to your organization’s specific situation, factor them into your strategic planning for the next few years, and adjust your business models and operations appropriately.
• The trends are mutually reinforcing, not isolated occurrences. Combine the technologies to fit your strategy, transformation intentions and benefit.
• Positive outcomes include enhancing resilience, maximizing value from data, attracting and retaining talent, achieving ESG goals, driving growth, and accelerating digital business.

3 things to tell your peers

1. The Gartner annual top strategic technology trends research helps you prioritize your investments, especially in the age of AI.
2. The trends for 2024 deliver one or more key benefits: protecting your investment, optimizing the rise of intelligent app/solution builders and delivering increased value.
3. Plot the right combination of technologies to achieve your CEO’s and CIO’s goals in coming years.

Source: Gartner