ORLANDO — A mashup of technologies including artificial intelligence and automation will begin to make a significant impact on businesses and IT organizations in 2019 according to Gartner’s annual Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends report.
The top 10 list, delivered at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo here, portends an overlap of trends such IoT being combined with AI, augmented analytics with edge computing that will deliver leading edge services and applications, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, told attendees.
Gartner says the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019 will be:
- Autonomous Things: This includes robots, drones and autonomous vehicles that will use AI to automate functions previously performed by humans. “As autonomous things proliferate, we expect a shift from stand-alone intelligent things to a swarm of collaborative intelligent things, with multiple devices working together, either independently of people or with human input,” Cearley said. “For example, if a drone examined a large field and found that it was ready for harvesting, it could dispatch an autonomous harvester.”
- Augmented Analytics: Cearley said this trend focuses on a specific area of augmented intelligence, using machine learning (ML) to transform how analytics content is developed, consumed and shared. Augmented analytics capabilities will advance rapidly to mainstream adoption, as a key feature of data preparation, data management, modern analytics, business process management, process mining and data science platforms. Automated insights from augmented analytics will also be embedded in enterprise applications — such as those for the HR, finance, sales, marketing, customer service, procurement and asset management departments — to optimize the decisions and actions of all employees within their context, not just those of analysts and data scientists. Augmented analytics automates the process of data preparation, insight generation and insight visualization, eliminating the need for professional data scientists in many situations.
- AI-Driven Development: Gartner believes that the market is rapidly shifting from an approach in which professional data scientists must partner with application developers to create most AI-enhanced solutions. Instead they are moving to a model in which the professional developer can operate alone using predefined models delivered as a service. This provides the developer with an ecosystem of AI algorithms and models, as well as development tools tailored to integrating AI capabilities and models into a solution. Another level of opportunity for professional application development arises as AI is applied to the development process itself to automate various data science, application development and