Gartner

Webinars
Gartner delivers actionable, objective
insight, guidance and tools to enable
stronger performance on your
organization’s mission critical priorities
 Enhance your webinar experience

Ask a Download Watch

Question Attachments Again

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
2 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Connect with Gartner
The 5 Technologies That Will
Transform Your Digital Future

Nick Jones
Distinguished VP Analyst

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
3 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Goal

• 5 Potentially transformational technologies

• Ignore the obvious – e.g. AI
• Likely to impact every organization
• Plus a few longer-term technologies for your
radar screens

4 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Transformational Technologies
Satellite Communications
1

Adaptive Autonomic
Tiny Ambient IoT 2 5
Drones and Robots

Secure Computation 3 4 Digital Humans

Other Radar Screen Candidates

5 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Key Issues

1. Which five technologies will enable innovation and disruption?

2. Which additional innovative technologies should be

on your watch list?

6 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 1 Satellite Communications
Inter Satellite
LEO Broadband Links In-Satellite LEO Supplementary
and IoT Satellites Services Cellular Satellite

Ground Optical Ground

Satellite Station
Station Receiver
Terminal

Cloud
Data
Standard
Centre
Cellphone
Internet Not to Scale
Internet

7 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Satellite Opportunities

LEO Satellites

Smartphone Broadband IoT

Supplementary Satellite Service Global Broadband Connectivity Global IoT Without Telcos
Remote Connectivity Resilience Affordable Hardware and
Lone Workers Affordable Services
Rural Broadband No Dependence on Telcos IoT in Remote Places
Support Legacy Cellular Mobility — E.g., Air, Maritime

8 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Satellite Future Directions and Challenges
Bigger launch vehicles reduce costs &
enable smarter satellites and bigger antennae
Optical links improve performance
More constellations, Kuiper joins the crowd
Lower latency than fibre

Not to scale
More standardization, e.g., 5G NTN
Too many aspiring
providers; Satellite drone connectivity becomes mainstream
Inevitable failures; Tighter integration between satellite comms
Volatile pricing & T&Cs and cloud zones
In-orbit data processing
Maintain 2G without a network
Constellation as a service

9 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 2 Tiny Ambient IoT Principles

No Battery

Very Low Cost Novel Manufacturing

Physically Small Low Power Wireless

Intelligent

10 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Ambient IoT Technologies & Applications

Printed electronics (including processors)

Future active tags < 10c
Wireless power
Sensor attached Printed 1c
to a butterfly processor Power harvesting
Stretchable electronics and substrates
Ultralow power/zero power wireless
Physically small devices, e.g., mm scale computing
Task-specific ultra-low-power chips, e.g., for AI
Energy harvesting Backscatter wireless at
Bluetooth tags 2.4 Ghz and mm wave Biodegradable electronics
Gateways, edge and smart access points
New Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards

11 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Ambient IoT Opportunities & Challenges

New ecosystems Garments + shop + washing machine + cleaners

Consumables + shop + smart home

Track and monitor anything relevant to your business

• Privacy concerns
Reduced loss, damage, theft
• Invisible IoT
concerns
Novel product behavior, e.g., products that report expiration
• E-waste
Unforgeable provenance, product passports • Requirements for
new infrastructure
New business models based on behavior
• Regulations
Invisible IoT

12 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 3 Secure Computation

Tension between exploiting data

and maintaining security/privacy

Trusted computation Decentralized/Distributed Transform data

environment processing & algorithms
E.g., Trusted third party, E.g., Federated E.g., Homomorphic
trusted hardware environment machine learning encryption, differential privacy,
zero-knowledge proof

Emerging Technologies to Facilitate Secure Computation

13 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Growing Portfolio of Secure Technologies
X Homomorphic encryption
TDX Accelerator chips
Camera with integrated Private drone anti-collision
X Differential privacy anonymization and management algorithms
TD Secure multiparty computation
Trusted execution environments
T Secure edge processing
Prototype homomorphic DNN on a chip,
X Data anonymization accelerator chips for edge AI
Special case secure algorithms
X Encrypted data storage algorithms T Trusted computation

TD X Decentralized/distributed processing
Privacy-preserving ML
D Transform data/algorithms
Secure IoT “things”

14 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Many innovations Need Secure Computation

Online
EV Charging Car Rental
Advertising
• Some tactics are computationally infeasible
without accelerators
• No technique addresses all requirements
Data Physical Drone Flight
Marketplaces Marketplaces Control • Some tactics are still technically complex
to implement and immature
• Some organizations may resist on cost
Digital or complexity grounds
Healthcare AI Training
Payments • Accuracy of results may be impacted
• Limits computations and algorithms that
maybe used
Business
Smart Home
Ecosystems ... • Governments may want access to
information

15 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 4 Digital Humans
Physical

Humanoid Robot

Virtual Influencer AI Avatar AI-Driven

Human-Driven (and Increasingly
Autonomic)
AI Digital Twin

Virtual Personal
Assistant (VPA) Chatbot

Virtual
16 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
The Digital Human Economy

Customer Licensed Resurrecting

Training
Service Personas the Dead

Entertainment Therapy Employed

Cybercrime
Agents

Influencers Companions Digital

Multipresence
Nonhumans

Digital
… Metaverse …
Assistants

Mainstream Future/Niche

17 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Digital Human Challenges

• Ethical usage and behavior

• Bias and stereotypes
• Regulation of digitals humans and
the associated AI
• Social backlash
• Incomplete behavior/appearance
• Crime, inappropriate influence, fake reality
• Technical complexity and computational
requirements
• Varying cultural attitudes to digital humans
• Customers/staff may have inappropriate
expectations or treat digital humans differently

18 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 5 Adaptive Autonomic Drones and Robots

Autonomic systems are self-managing physical or software systems,

performing domain-bounded tasks, that exhibit three fundamental
characteristics:
Autonomy. They execute their own decisions and tasks
autonomously without external assistance.
Learning. They modify their behaviour and internal operations
based on experience and changing conditions as well as potentially
changing goals. The ability of autonomic systems to learn and evolve
their behaviour means some may be nondeterministic.
Agency. They have a sense of their own internal state and purpose
which guides how and what they learn and enables them to act
independently upon decisions made.

19 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Key Technologies for Adaptive Robots

Adaptive AI for robots

Adaptive AI Goal-oriented, real-time feedback
Adapts to changing environments

Collaborative learning
New Ways Collaborative autonomy, e.g., swarm mapping
to Learn ChatGPT helps robot understand instructions
Virtual training environments

Learn by watching examples

New Ways
ChatGPT writes robot code
to Teach Robots
Speech recognition and control

20 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Adaptive Autonomic Opportunities

We can’t train robots for all possibilities or all users

Need agility and flexibility to handle new tasks

• Nondeterministic behavior
Adaptive behavior enables personalized behavior
• Explainable AI is immature
Enables the use of robots to scale by orders of magnitude
• Warranty and liability challenges
Custom programming is impractical
Directed by consumers and nonexperts • LLM data and behavior may be
Learning instead of programming unreliable or unpredictable
• Trial and error learning doesn’t work for
Adapt to wear and tear
many tasks
Robots operating out of touch with human minders • Some technologies are very immature,
e.g., learn by observation

21 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 Key Issue Take-Away:
Task your technology strategy team
to evaluate digital humans, satellite
communications, ambient tiny IoT, secure
computation and autonomic robots.

22 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Key Issues

1. Which five technologies will enable innovation and disruption?

2. Which additional innovative technologies should be

on your watch list?

23 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Maintain a Watching Brief

• Programmable optical chips

• Enables agile/wider use of Programmable
photonics Photonics

• Quantum computing New Processor

Technologies
• Edge supercomputing
• Optical processing
• Postsilicon electronics
• Task-specific accelerators

24 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Maintain a Watching Brief
• Proposed major update to internet
protocols & architecture
New IP • Shift of internet control toward ITU
• Highly disruptive
• Uncertain need & politically contentious

Next-Generation
Networking • 6G
• Quantum networking
• Terahertz wireless
• Network becomes a platform
• Long range optical networks
25 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 Key Issue Take-Away:
Establish a trend and technology watching
team and process to identify and categorize
disruptive technologies.

26 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
Recommendations
Seek new business opportunities enabled by individual technologies
and combinations of these emerging technologies.
Review the effectiveness of your trend and technology spotting process
to ensure it’s capturing the relevant material.
Build strong communications channels with a wide range of business
peers to understand where emerging technologies can address their
needs.
Consider academic partners to provide advice on more advanced
techniques.
Assess the potential social and regulatory issues of technologies such
as digital humans and ambient IoT before adoption.

27 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
 Ask the speaker

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
28 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Gartner Conferences
2023-2024
Access more research-backed
insights to master your role and
transform your business.

View the global Gartner

conference calendar at:
gartner.com/cal

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
29 © 2021 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Top Strategic
Technology Trends
2024
Download eBook

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
© 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This presentation, including all supporting materials,is proprietary to Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is for the sole internal use of the intended recipients. Because
30 © 2022 Gartner, Inc. may
this presentation and/or its affiliates.
contain All rights
information reserved.
that is confidential, proprietary or otherwise legally protected, it may not be further copied, distributed or publicly displayed without the express written permission of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Gartner for IT on
social media

Want to stay in-the-know? Connect

with us on LinkedIn and X (formerly
known as Twitter) to receive the latest
Gartner IT insights and updates
across research, events and more. It’s
all curated specifically for IT leaders
and decision-makers.
Follow us on

Looking for insights delivered to

your inbox?
Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter.

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
© 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Become a Client
Clients receive 24/7 access to proven management
and technology research, expert advice,
benchmarks, diagnostics and more.

Fill out the form to connect with a representative

and learn more.

Learn More

Or give us a call: +441784614280 | +1 855 637 0291

8 a.m. – 7 p.m. ET
8 a.m. – 5 p.m. GMT
Monday through Friday

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
32 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 Get more Gartner insights

Download the research slides

View upcoming and on-demand Gartner webinars

at gartner.com/webinars

Rate this session

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
33 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Rate this session

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION
34 © 2023 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.