Gartner's Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024: Protect, Build, and Deliver

pcmag.com:

Unsurprisingly, AI dominated Gartner's annual list of the top 10 strategic trends for the coming year. (Here's last year's list.) But I was interested in how Chris Howard, the firm's global chief of research, focused on how much is left to be done in AI and in other technologies.

Leaning on Gartner's Hype Cycle, Howard started by saying that we're at "the peak of inflated expectations" for AI and about to enter "the trough of disillusionment," where the work really needs to happen. He's seen a lot of talk about generative AI but not a lot of things put into practice yet. So this year's list of technology trends are focused on what people can use to implement the new technology.

According to Howard, it takes a while for technologies to mature. Trends the company highlighted in previous years—like cloud platforms, human augmentation, AI engineering, and adaptive AI—can be seen as stepping stones to democratized generative AI. "Everything is trending, everywhere, all at once," he said.

The top trends for 2024 fit into three big themes: Protect Your Investment, Rise of the Builders, and Deliver the Value.

Howard talked about how AI is now a partner, not just a tool, a theme highlighted in the earlier keynote. But it's also created a new attack surface, so you'll need AI Trust, Risk and Security, or what Gartner calls "AI TRiSM."

Until January 2023, "magic quadrant" was the most searched term on Gartner.com, but since then, ChatGPT gets four times the searches. Still, AI has been a theme for years. In 2022, 48% of CIOs said their organizations had already implemented AI models, and 73% were running more than 100 models. But 40% have already suffered from security or privacy issues, he said.

Howard talked about moving from