Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Artificial intelligence, immersive experiences, digital twins, event-thinking and continuous adaptive security create a foundation for the next generation of digital business models and ecosystems.
How do designers make cars safer? They treat them like a school of fish. Safe Swarm, recently unveiled by Honda, uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication to allow cars to pass information on to other cars in the vicinity. For example, alerts about an accident miles up the road could be relayed to cars miles back, enabling them to operate collaboratively and intelligently to avoid accidents and mitigate traffic.
The evolution of intelligent things, such as collective thinking car swarms, is one of 10 strategic trends with broad industry impact and significant potential for disruption.
“The continuing digital business evolution exploits new digital models to align more closely the physical and digital worlds for employees, partners and customers,” says David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, at Gartner 2017 Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida. “Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future.”
The Intelligent Digital Mesh
Gartner calls the entwining of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh. It’s enabled by digital models, business platforms and a rich, intelligent set of services to support digital business.
Intelligent: How AI is seeping into virtually every technology and with a defined, well-scoped focus can allow more dynamic, flexible and potentially autonomous systems.
Digital: Blending the virtual and real worlds to create an immersive digitally enhanced and connected environment.
Mesh: The connections between an expanding set of people, business, devices, content and services to deliver digital outcomes.