By David Weldon
Gartner’s top 10 tech predictions for 2019 and beyond
Digital innovation will soon outpace the ability of many organizations to keep up, and have dramatic impacts on artificial intelligence and related skills, cultural advancement and processes becoming products.
What’s in store in 2019?
At it's annual ITxpo Symposium in Orlando last week, Gartner released its list of the top 10 tech predictions it expects to see over the next five years, which will have three fundamental effects. “As the advance of technology concepts continues to outpace the ability of enterprises to keep up, organizations now face the possibility that so much change will increasingly seem chaotic. But chaos does not mean there is no order. The key is that CIOs will need to find their way to identifying practical actions that can be seen within the chaos,” said Gartner vice president and distinguished fellow Daryl Plummer.
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Through 2020, 80 percent of artificial intelligence projects will remain alchemy, run by wizards whose talents won’t scale widely in the organization.
“In the last five years, the increasing popularity of AI techniques has facilitated the proliferation of projects across a wide number of organizations worldwide,” Gartner says. “However, change is still outpacing the production of competent AI professionals. When it comes to AI techniques, the needed talent is not only technically demanding, mathematically savvy data scientists to inventive data engineers, and rigorous operation research professionals to shrewd logisticians, are needed.”
By 2023, there will be an 80 percent reduction in missing people in mature markets compared with 2018 due to AI face recognition.
“Over the next few years, facial matching and 3D facial imaging will become important elective aspects of capturing data about vulnerable populations, such as children and the elderly or people who are otherwise impaired,” Gartner says. “Such measures will reduce the number of missing people without adding large numbers of dramatic discoveries in large public crowds, which is the popularly imagined environment. The most important advances will take place with more robust image capture, image library development, image analysis strategy and public acceptance. Additionally, with improved on-device/edge AI capability on cameras, public and private sectors will be able to prefilter necessary image data instead of sending all video streams to cloud for processing.”
By 2023, U.S. emergency department visits will be reduced by 20 million due to enrollment of chronically ill patients in AI-enhanced virtual care.
“Clinician shortages, particularly in rural and some urban areas, are driving healthcare providers to look for new approaches to delivering care,” Gartner explains. “In many cases, virtual care has shown it can offer care more conveniently and cost-effectively than conventional face-to-face care. Gartner research shows that successful use of virtual care helps control costs, improves quality of delivery and improves access to care. Without change, the traditionally rigid physical care delivery methods will increasingly render healthcare providers noncompetitive. This transition will not come easily, and will require modification of cultural attitudes and healthcare financial models.”
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By 2023, 25 percent of organizations will require employees to sign an affidavit to avoid cyberbullying, but 70 percent of these initiatives will fail.
“To prevent actions that have a detrimental impact on the organization’s reputation, employers want to strengthen employee behavioral guidelines (such as anti-harassment and discrimination norms) when using social media,” Gartner says. “Signing an affidavit of agreement to refrain from cyberbullying is a logical next step. Alternatively, legacy code of conduct agreements should be updated to incorporate cyberbullying.”
Through 2022, 75 percent of organizations with frontline decision-making teams reflecting diversity and an inclusive culture will exceed their financial targets.
“Business leaders across all functions understand the positive business impact of diversity and inclusion (D&I),” Gatyner says. “A key business requirement currently is the need for better decisions made fast at the lowest level possible, ideally at the frontline. To create inclusive teams, organizations need to move beyond obvious diversity cues such as gender and race, to seek out people with diverse work styles and thought patterns. A final key factor to ensure D&I initiatives directly contribute to business results is to manage scale and employee engagement with them. There are numerous technologies that can significantly enhance the scale and effectiveness of interventions to diagnose the current state of inclusion, develop leaders who foster inclusion and embed inclusion into daily business execution.”
By 2021, 75 percent of public blockchains will suffer “privacy poisoning” — inserted personal data that renders the blockchain noncompliant with privacy laws.
“Companies that implement blockchain systems without managing privacy issues by design run the risk of storing personal data that can’t be deleted without compromising chain integrity,” Gartner explains. “A public blockchain is a pseudo-anarchic autonomous system such as the internet. Nobody can sue the internet, or make it accountable for the data being transmitted. Similarly, a public blockchain can’t be made accountable for the content it bears.”
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By 2023, ePrivacy regulations will increase online costs by minimizing the use of “cookies” thus crippling the current internet ad revenue machine.
“GDPR and upcoming legislation, including The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and ePrivacy continue to limit the use of cookies and put greater pressure on what constitutes informed consent,” Gartner notes. “An individual may not be able to simply accept the use of cookies, as they do now, but, will have to give explicit consent to what the cookie track and how that tracking will be used.”
Through 2022, a fast path to digital will be converting internal capabilities to external revenue-generating products using cloud economics and flexibility.
“For years, internal IT organizations that developed unique capabilities wanted to take them to market to generate value for their organizations, but economic, technical and other issues did not allow this to happen,” Gartner explains. “Cloud infrastructure and cloud services providers change all of these dynamics. Capacity for supporting scale of the application solution is the cloud provider’s responsibility. Market-dominant app stores take over distribution and aspects of marketing. Simpler, accessible cloud tools make the support and enhancement of applications as products easier. Cloud also shifts the impacts on internal financial statements from below the line to above the line areas. As more aggressive companies convert internal processes and data into marketable solutions and start to report digital revenue gains, other organizations will follow suit.”
By 2022, companies leveraging the “gatekeeper” position of the digital giants will capture 40 percent global market share, on average, in their industry.
“Global market share of the top four firms by industry fell by four percentage points between 2006 and 2014 as European firms, likely weakened and distracted by economic and monetary crises, lost market share to a rising group of emerging market firms, particularly those from China,” Gartner says. “But the path to achieving and sustaining a dominant market share position globally is likely to lead to and through one or more of the digital giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) and their ecosystems. These giants already command massive consumer share and have begun to use their “gatekeeper” positions and infrastructure to enter the B2B space as well. They are keenly aware of the trend to connect, are leading the advance into capabilities such as AI, and have aggressively taken actions to invade the “physical world” and make it part of their digital world — a world they control.
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