In the dynamic world of business, the pursuit of innovation is an everyday endeavor that organisations must embrace to thrive. Over the past twenty years, the pace of technological advancements has accelerated dramatically, presenting both opportunities and challenges.

Presented at the recent Gold Coast Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™, Gartner Analyst Gene Alvarez, and Key Initiative Leader for Gartner’s Technology Innovation and Strategy research agenda, says we should think of innovation like surfing. It’s all about getting ready to ride the waves of current, emerging, and future tech trends.

As we embark on this journey, Alvarez says it’s crucial to recognise the technological waves that are currently crashing towards us. These innovations are not just trends; they are foundational shifts that require considered attention from decision-makers at the highest levels. Among the technologies making waves today are artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations have proven to be disruptive, impacting various sectors and challenging traditional business models. They are not limited to a single industry but have global implications, redefining how we work, communicate, and engage with customers.

Then there are the waves on the horizon. The emerging trends that are beginning to take shape. These are the waves that are just beyond the shore, on the verge of breaking. Organisations must prepare to ride these trends to maintain their competitive edge. And then there are the ‘future waves’. The ones still forming in the distance: The Next Generation of Innovation.

All of these trends, Gartner believes have the potential to help you shape the future with responsible innovation and are contained within three trend sets.

Agentic AI: 2-3 years

At the forefront of technological advancements are Agentic AI systems, which possess a level of autonomy that allows them to make decisions and learn from experiences. Gartner believes this is a trend that is happening in the next two to three years and in some cases, even now.

Unlike traditional AI, which merely executes predetermined tasks, Agentic AI can plan actions and adapt to evolving situations. This paradigm shift suggests that businesses will increasingly rely on these digital agents, which operate tirelessly without the need for vacations or sick days, thereby augmenting human capabilities and enhancing productivity.

From the lens of what’s happening now, Gartner says what we are going to see is vendors adding agentic behavior into their software. We’ll see this in ERP, CRM, and supply chain and you’re going to have to understand what they do and don’t do for you. Another thing to watch for is employees using their own AI agents to augment their tasks. Would it be comforting for you to hear your Developer inform you that they have setup an AI Agent to run all of your critical infrastructure whilst they are on holiday? Probably not. So, don’t let Agentic AI, or AI in general, become the next generation of shadow IT in your organisation.

Gartner’s advice: Act now to establish clear policies around BYO AI.

AI Governance Platforms: 2-3 years

As the influence of AI expands, Gartner says we are going to see AI Governance (click here to read what we have to say about AI Governance) become just as critical as cyber security, and with that, AI Governance Platforms will become essential. These platforms will create trust through transparency. Transparency on what was the data used to train the model? How was it trained? How was this answer that I got out of the prompt generated and created?

Driving this trend further is of course, ethics. In terms of corporate strategies, we all want to be ethical in our practices. And so, AI Governance platforms will check to make sure that what we’re doing complies to our company’s ethics and legal requirements, ensuring AI applications do not inadvertently perpetuate discrimination or harm, and protect our organisational integrity.

Disinformation Security: 1-3 years

Disinformation is bad gossip. We’ve all seen it. We all fear it. If it’s about your company, how do you know it’s true? What’s the source? Disinformation Security is how we protect ourselves from it.

As Generative AI is capable of impersonating individuals, there is the potential for bad actors to bypass security systems and get inside your organisation. Disinformation Security then becomes an emerging category of technology aimed at creating trust, assessing truth, and tracking the spread of information. As disinformation security grows as a trend, Gartner says we can expect to see the rise of more deep fake identification software that checks for synthetic media, new ways to prevent impersonation, and tighter processes around brand protection that unites marketing, security, and communications teams together.

Post-Quantum Cryptography: 2-3 years

As quantum computing advances, the need for Post-Quantum Cryptography will become increasingly pressing. As Gartner explains, Quantum computing can break asymmetric encryption which is used by every application that you have in your organisation that connects to the web, and more that you may not even know about. If Quantum computing can break every one of these locks, then every one of them also needs to be able to be replaced by an algorithm that cannot be broken by both classical computing and quantum computing – this algorithm is known as Post-Quantum Cryptography.

And the reality of this scenario occurring is not so far-fetched. Have you heard of the term ‘harvest now and decrypt later’? This is a practice whereby Red Hackers go into your organisations encrypted data, harvest it, and save it for when quantum can break it for them.

It’s not a simple upgrade or patch. It’s a huge scale of work and investment that will require you to have an inventory of every place where you are using cryptographic encryption, have a crypto agile approach to updating applications, and replace hardware to handle the performance problems that come with post-quantum algorithms that take more computing power.

The emergence of Ambient Invisible Intelligence: 3-7 years

RFID tags came with a lot of promise, but the price of chips kept the potential out of reach for many organisations. Now with the decreasing costs of ultra-low-power wireless tags, organisations can now monitor their assets in real time. We’re seeing this playout in various industries, from retail to logistics, transforming how they track and manage inventory.

In the longer term, Gartner says we can expect to see more deeper integration of these tags into every type of device, and into every type of product that we can possibly have, creating a world of smart everything – or what Gartner refers to as Ambient Invisible Intelligence. Now, why is this important? Well, real-time inventory and millions of items really matter to industries like retail, food production, and warehousing, and with ambient tags, organisations could track every meaningful data point of every product on every journey to ensure integrity and optimise supply chains.

When to act? Ambient tags are still too expensive to go mainstream. Once you see prices dropping to say $0.20, that’s the time to start experimenting, and the time to start preparing for your infrastructure to handle much more data.

Energy-efficient computing: 3-5 years

With rising energy costs, increased power demands from energy-intensive technologies like AI, and corporate objectives pushing the need to reduce carbon footprint, organisations are going to have to look for more than just incremental power saving improvements. In the long term, we have to find real innovative technology that’s going to save us energy but deliver more computing power. But in the short term, strategies for energy-efficient computing may include migrating to green cloud providers or rewriting algorithms for energy efficiency. Along with monitoring what’s happening with specific big-ticket technologies – like AI, and factoring in electricity saving improvements.

Hybrid computing: 10 years

Whilst Gartner says hybrid computing is 10 years away. Things are happening now in the Hybrid Computing space with several new computing paradigms on our doorstep. CPUs, GPUs, application-specific integrated circuits, neomorphic, quantum, optical, and DNA storage, being just a few examples.

The problem with this is migrations are messy. Some organisations are still working to get off Mainframes, or client servers, and now there are several new paradigms coming to light.

What should you do about that? Gartner says we should be changing our mindset. We shouldn’t be looking at how to move one from to another, but how to get all to work together and learn to take advantage of where they’re efficient, what the capabilities of that individual computing paradigm is, in order to support a process going across all of them.

This means we can expect to see more application and hardware specific integrations to handle orchestration, and we need to look at the integration orchestration platforms that are going to emerge that enable you to take a process and run it across multiple computing paradigms using the most efficient paths across all of them. That’s hybrid computing, says Gartner.

Next up is Human-Machine Synergy, which is a combination of three sets of trends that converge the physical digital world into one single reference that you can see through a lens.

Spatial computing: 1-3 years

Spatial computing combines various technologies to integrate digital information into the physical world, allowing digital objects to exist and interact with the environment as if they were actually there. For example, you could have a worker on a shop floor looking at a machine and wondering how to take out a certain part. They could look at it and it will point to where things need to be taken out safely, what has to be turned off in advance, how to put the part back in, what replacement parts need to be ordered, all in a hands-free interface. This immersive 3D experience bridges the physical and digital world in a new way of sight, and one which can also be used for more inclusive use cases such as bringing a team together in a virtual workroom where they can work on the design together and each one of them would see the complete experience in their heads-up display.

The trigger point for you to watch out for? When you see more applications being developed and offered for logistics, manufacturing or customer facing, it’s time to think about moving on this trend.

Poly-Functional Robots: 3-10 years

Complementing the trend for Spatial Computing is the Poly-functional robot. It is a navigator, a hacker. It can defend itself. It can change its location. You tell it what you want it to do and it works it out. And since they do more than one thing, it’s costs can be spread across multiple departments. Gartner believes that 80% of humans will engage with these robots every day by 2030.

Now for the last, and scary one.

Neurological enhancements: 10+ years

Neurological enhancements hold the potential to enhance human capabilities and performance by reading our brains. It could be as simple as putting in a pair of earbuds, or a headband, or a pair of glasses, or a vest, and an area where trials have proven successful is in preventing accidents based on fatigue. For example, a truck driver wears the device embedded in earbuds. It detects that the driver is drowsy and tells them to pull over and take a rest. Other potential use cases could be enabling people who’ve lost their eyesight, lost their hearing, taste, and other functions to have those functions back.

Bidirectional machine interfaces in cases today, have proven high acceptability in medical cases, and it is expected that they’re going to start to move into other areas and whilst there is no call to action to act now, tracking this technology over the next 10 years is the advice.