Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2021 demystified

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.)

These three main themes were seen by Gartner

1. 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.“
2. Accelerating growth: „[…] balancing technology risk with the appetite for business risk, and ensuring that organizational growth targets are near-term and achievable.“
3. 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).