The 25 disruptive technologies to watch on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2024 are in four key areas: autonomous AI, developer productivity, total experience and human-centric security and privacy programmes.

“GenAI is over the peak of inflated expectations as business focus continues to shift from excitement around foundation models to use cases that drive ROI,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. “This is accelerating autonomous AI. While the current generation of AI models lack agency, AI research labs are rapidly releasing agents, which can dynamically interact with their environment to achieve goals, although this development will be a gradual process.

While AI continues to grab attention, CIOs and other IT executives must examine other emerging technologies with transformational potential for developers, security and customer and employee experience – and strategise how to exploit these technologies in line with their organisations’ ability to handle unproven technologies, advised Chandrasekaran.

Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is unique among Gartner hype cycles because it distils key insights from more than 2 000 technologies and applies frameworks that Gartner profiles each year into a succinct set of “must-know” emerging technologies. These technologies have potential to deliver transformational benefits over the next two to 10 years (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2024

The four themes of emerging technology trends are:

1. Autonomous AI: AI’s fast evolution is producing autonomous AI systems that can operate with minimal human oversight, improve themselves and become effective at decision-making in complex environments. These advanced AI systems, which can perform any task like a human, are beginning to move slowly from science fiction to reality. These technologies include multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents and reinforcement learning.
2. Boost developer productivity: Developer productivity is about more than writing code quickly. It’s influenced by developers’ effective communication and collaboration and their feeling of energised focus, full involvement and enjoyment (being in the “flow state”). “Technology is revolutionising the way developers design and deliver software, making them more productive than ever,” said Chandrasekaran. “It’s ensuring they deliver higher-quality products quickly while maximising gains by improving developer satisfaction, collaboration and flow.” Emerging technologies enabling developer productivity include AI-augmented software engineering, cloud-native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering and WebAssembly.
3. Empower with total experience: Total experience is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining customer, employee, multi and user experience practices. It uses technology to address critical interactions, empowering customers and employees, with the goal of driving greater confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Technologies to assess include digital twin of a customer, spatial computing, superapps and 6G.
4. Deliver human-centric security and privacy: Organisations will become more resilient by using security and privacy techniques that create a culture of mutual trust and awareness of shared risks between teams. “Security practices too often rely on the premise that humans can behave in a completely safe and secure way but, when employees must make a choice between security and business delivery, they often choose business delivery, sometimes bypassing too-stringent security controls,” said Chandrasekaran. “Human-centric security and privacy weaves a tight security and privacy fabric into the organisation’s digital design.” Emerging technologies supporting human-centric security and privacy include AI TRiSM, cybersecurity mesh architecture, digital immune system, disinformation security, federated machine learning and homomorphic encryption.