Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023

We expect the 2023 trends to impact enterprise strategies in the coming three years by enabling organisations to address four key priorities:

• optimising resilience, operations or trust;
• scaling vertical solutions, product delivery or everywhere;
• pioneering customer engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity; and
• pursuing sustainable technology solutions.

These trends optimise IT systems for greater reliability, improve data-driven decision-making and maintain value and integrity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in production.

• The Digital Immune System creates an enhanced customer experience by combining multiple software engineering strategies to protect against risk. Through observability, automation and extreme design and testing, it delivers resilient systems that mitigate operational and security risks.

• Applied Observability works from the data emitted by an organisation, using AI to analyse and make recommendations, which allow an enterprise to make faster and more accurate future decisions. When applied systematically, it can reduce the latency for response and optimise business operations in real time.

• AI TRISM supports AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, efficacy and data protection. It combines methods for explaining AI results, rapidly deploying new models, actively managing AI security and controls for privacy and ethics issues.

These technology trends accelerate vertical offerings, increase the pace of product delivery and enable connectivity everywhere.

• Industry Cloud Platforms combine SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with tailored, industry-specific functionality that organisations can use to more easily adapt to the relentless stream of disruptions in their industry.

• Platform Engineering provides a curated set of tools, capabilities and processes packaged for easy consumption by developers and end users. It will increase end users’ productivity and reduce the burden on development teams.

• Wireless-value Realisation covers the provision of wireless network services from everything, including traditional end-user computing, support for edge devices, digital tagging solutions, etc. Such networks go well beyond pure connectivity, providing location and other real-time information and insight from analytics, and allow systems to harvest network energy directly.

Delivering technology alone will not be enough in 2023. Sustainable technology is a framework of solutions that increases the energy and efficiency of IT services; enables enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, analytics, emissions management software and AI; and helps customers achieve their own sustainability objectives.

Investments in sustainable technology also have the potential to create greater operational resiliency and financial performance, while providing new avenues for growth.

In short:

• Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends will help fulfil your business needs to optimise, scale or pioneer.

• The trends allow you to align your technology innovation with the future strategic objectives of your enterprise.

• Investments in sustainable technology provide operational and financial benefits, and can create growth opportunities.

David Groombridge is a Distinguished VP Analyst within the IT Leaders and Technical Professionals team in Gartner Research. He undertakes analysis on all phases of the IT sourcing cycle, with a particular focus on best practices in the sourcing of outsourced digital workplace services, hybrid infrastructure services and hosting of SAP systems. He provides guidance for clients on vendor selection, contract pricing, structure and terms, and commercial negotiations.