TL;DR
The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2021 highlights three dominant themes: engineering trust, accelerating growth, and sculpting change. Featured technologies range from very early Innovation Trigger bets like Active Metadata Management and AI-Augmented Software Engineering to maturing concepts such as Decentralized Finance, Multiexperience and Composable Networks. The cycle is a positioning tool – it shows where a technology sits between hype and productivity, not which one is „best“.
Every year I’m asking myself the same questions about what those new popping up technologies actually mean and how we can benefit from them.
So this is the new 2021 version of Emerging Technologies.
(And again be aware of Gartner itself and what they do and how those technologies might have come visible on this graph. But as it is broadly used among management it is always worth taking a look at.)
| Theme | What it means | Example Technologies |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering Trust | Building infrastructure that delivers resilient, secure and ethical IT. | Decentralized Identity, Machine-Readable Legislation, Active Metadata Management. |
| Accelerating Growth | Going beyond traditional IT to drive new digital business value. | AI-Driven Innovation, Quantum ML, Generative AI, Industry Clouds. |
| Sculpting Change | Reacting to changing user, customer and business expectations. | Composable Networks, Multiexperience, Self-Integrating Applications, Digital Humans. |
These three main themes were seen by Gartner
- Engineering trust: „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.“
- Accelerating growth: „[…] balancing technology risk with the appetite for business risk, and ensuring that organizational growth targets are near-term and achievable.“
- Sculpting change: „The key is to recognize the disruption, and embrace technologies to sculpt the shift and bring order to what otherwise may be chaos. You must anticipate and influence change to mitigate risk.“ – frankly said: use your brain and make reasonable decisions.
Tech in detail
I’ll go from innovation trigger towards the plateau of productivity:
- Digital Platform Conductor (DPC) Tools – to describe the rise of tools that enable I&O leaders to strategically manage across their infrastructure, regardless of environment or location.
- Quantum ML is the integration of quantum algorithms within machine learning programs.
- AI-Augmented-Design as part of formative AI helps for instance UX designers to create new solutions by using AI-enabled tools.
- AI-Driven Innovation as in define, review, and identify solutions by using AI-enabled tools.
- Influence Engineering for marketers will increasingly use sophisticated data-driven analysis and applied psychology to influence consumers.
- Machine-Readable Legislation from the trust domain for updating law needs a readable form.
- Named Data Networking is a proposed Future Internet architecture inspired by years of empirical research into network usage and a growing awareness of unsolved problems in contemporary Internet architectures like IP.
- Physics-Informed AI integrates seamlessly data and mathematical physics models, even in partially understood, uncertain and high-dimensional contexts.
- Sovereign Cloud is a country-specific requirement that data (in the cloud) is subject to the laws of the country in which it is collected or processed and must remain within its borders.
- Industry Cloud focuses on specialized processes with tools and business services dedicated to a specific industry.
- Homomorphic Encryption is a form of encryption with an additional evaluation capability for computing over encrypted data without access to the secret key.
- Self-Integrating Applications integrate themselves relatively seamlessly.
- Composable Networks as of composable infrastructure.
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum.
- Real-Time Incident Center-aaS 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.
- Active Metadata Management ensures that data is transformed correctly as it flows through multiple systems and that the data remains accurate. Analytics capabilities should then leverage machine learning algorithms for continuous self-learning to improve data quality.
- Digital Humans beings are photorealistic digitized virtual versions of humans. These AI-powered virtual beings are designed to interact, sympathize, and have conversations just like a fellow human would.
- Multiexperience is about leveraging various modalities, digital touchpoints, apps, and devices to design and develop a seamless experience for the customers. The idea is to interact with the customers at as many touch points as possible to offer a consistent customer experience across the web, mobile, app, and other modalities.
- Generative AI refers to programs that can use existing content like text, audio files, or images to create new plausible content.
- Composable Applications as of reusability of applications.
- Employee Communications Applications is about delivering a personalized communications experience that facilitates employee understanding and behavior change in ways that align with company goals while providing employees the opportunity to provide feedback to management on those goals.
- AI Augmented Software Engineering searches and structures previously developed similar codes and code snippets.
- Nonfungible Tokens (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files.
- Data Fabric provides seamless access across multi-clouds, data centers, and edge systems.
- Decentralized Identity is an emerging concept that gives back control of identity to consumers through the use of an identity wallet in which they collect verified information about themselves from certified issuers (such as the Government).
FAQ – Gartner Hype Cycle 2021
The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is an annual report that plots roughly 25 emerging technologies on a curve with five stages: Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity. It helps decision makers understand where a technology stands relative to public attention and real-world adoption.
Gartner highlighted three themes for 2021: Engineering Trust (building resilient and ethical IT foundations), Accelerating Growth (using digital tech to create new business value) and Sculpting Change (reacting to shifting user, customer and societal expectations). Most of the 2021 emerging technologies sit within one of these three buckets.
The five stages are: 1) Innovation Trigger – first proof points of a new technology, 2) Peak of Inflated Expectations – early publicity creates exaggerated promises, 3) Trough of Disillusionment – interest cools as experiments fail, 4) Slope of Enlightenment – realistic use cases emerge, and 5) Plateau of Productivity – mainstream adoption and stable benefit.
No. The Hype Cycle is a positioning tool, not a buying or investment recommendation. It tells you how mature a technology is in terms of expectations and adoption, but not whether it fits your specific industry, business model or risk profile. Combine it with your own strategy work, customer research and pilot projects.
Many emerging technologies need years to move from Innovation Trigger to Plateau of Productivity. Gartner re-evaluates each technology annually and shifts it along the curve based on adoption, vendor activity and real use cases. Some technologies fall off the chart because they become mainstream; others disappear because they fail to deliver on their early promise.
