3 Themes Surface in the 2021 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Earlier this year, Christie’s announced two major firsts for an auction house: It would accept cryptocurrency, and it would offer for sale a purely digital work backed by a unique nonfungible token (NFT).

The work, by digital artist Beeple, sold for more than $69 million. It forms part of an entirely new means of monetization — and potentially a whole new digital ecosystem.

一个非功能性测试是一个独特的blockchain-based digital asset that links to real-world assets like digital art or music and tokenized physical assets like houses or cars. In the case of art, the NFT verifies provenance, ownership and access. NFTs use immutable public blockchains and, as of last month, had a market valuation greater than $300 million.

Download Now:2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap

NFTs are also one of the additions to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2021, which highlights the 25 breakthrough technologies that will have the most significant effect on business and society over the next two-to-ten years.

Listen Now:Behind the Research: The Gartner Hype Cycle

“Breakthrough technologies are continually appearing, challenging even the most innovative organizations to keep up,” saysBrian Burke, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Your focus ondigital business transformationmeans you must accelerate change and cut through the hype surrounding these technologies.”

This year’s technologies, selected for their potential transformational benefits and broad potential impact, fall under three main themes:

1. Engineering trust
2. Accelerating growth
3. Sculpting change

Theme 1: Engineering trust

For IT teams to effectively lead technology-enabled business transformation, they must engineer a trusted business core. Trust requires security and reliability, but must also be built on working practices that are repeatable, proven, scalable and innovative. These practices establish a resilient core and foundation for IT to deliver business value.

例如,实时事件指挥中心a service improve situational awareness for organizations by fusing together information from various sources. Typically a public safety organization has some more manual way of integrating databases, sensors, video, and communications systems for an emergency command center.

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However, the as-a-service offering simplifies the real-time function of a command center. Initial interest came from creating next-generation real-time centers to reduce crime. However, use cases have expanded to include wildfire management, natural disasters, special events, and — particularly relevant — pandemic response.

The major challenge with this technology is the required amount of interagency cooperation. All of this data (i.e., databases, radio, IoT, mass notifications, license plate readers and geolocation tracking) is typically owned by separate entities. Nevertheless, real-time incident command centers as a service could improve emergency response.

Read More:Data Fabric Architecture is Key to Modernizing Data Management and Integration

Other technologies in that fall into the engineering trust bucket include sovereign cloud, homomorphic encryption and data fabric.

Theme 2: Accelerating growth

与一个可信的商业核心,你,因为它leaders and CIOs, must focus on initiatives that drive the organization’s growth. That means balancing technology risk with the appetite for business risk, and ensuring that organizational growth targets are near-term and achievable.

Consider digital humans, which are digital-twin representations of people. This technology presents an opportunity for licensed personas that enable new revenue streams. They can appear as avatars, humanoid robots or conversational user interfaces, like chatbots or smart speakers. These interactive, AI-driven representations seem human and behave in “humanlike” ways supported by a range of technologies including conversational UI, CGI and 3D real-time autonomous animation.

Use cases abound for these humanoid technologies in HR training, communications, medical care and customer service. COVID-19 has pushed the technology potential to enable no-touch experiences, combat social isolation and provide care to the elderly. Digital humans have appeared in feature films, performed at conferences and acted as brand influencers. Societal roadblocks and ethical concerns, in addition to immature technologies, create challenges for digital humans, but the potential for business impact and differentiation is pushing some organizations to pursue this technology.

Other emerging technologies that fall under accelerating growth include multi-experience, industry cloud and quantum ML.