Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023

See what, when and how key technology trends will impact your strategic ambitions in the coming three years.

What are the Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023?

• Digital Immune System
• Applied Observability
• AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRISM)
• Industry Cloud Platforms
• Platform Engineering
• Wireless-Value Realization
• Superapps
• Adaptive AI 
• Metaverse 
• Sustainable Technology

How do Gartner strategic technology trends relate to your business?

Maybe your business needs to save costs, to improve margin or to reinvest. Or maybe your enterprise is still trying to grow. Perhaps this is the time for a pivot — to reinvent the business model. Some of you may even need to do all of these at once. 

Business leaders and technologists can use this list to assess the potential impact of these technology trends on your specific strategies, such as growing revenue, accelerating digital, maximizing value from data, or protecting and building your brand. 

These trends could represent a risk or opportunity for your organization and this list will help you create a technology roadmap to drive impact on a range of strategic ambitions. 

By looking at when these trends will become most relevant, you can establish your own pathway, realizing they also don’t need to be done all at once.

What business priorities will the 2023 technology trends help address?

We expect the 2023 trends to impact enterprise strategies in the coming three years by enabling organizations to address four key priorities: 

• Optimizing resilience, operations or trust
• Scaling vertical solutions, product delivery or everywhere
• Pioneering customer engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity
• Pursuing sustainable technology solutions

Theme 1: Optimize

These trends optimize IT systems for greater reliability, improve data-driven decision making and maintain value and integrity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in production. 

• Digital Immune System creates an enhanced customer experience by combining multiple software engineering strategies to protect against risk. Through observability, automation, and extreme design and testing, it delivers resilient systems that mitigate operational and security risks.
• Applied Observability works from the data emitted by an organization, using AI to analyze and make recommendations, which allow an enterprise to make faster and more accurate future decisions. When applied systematically, it can reduce the latency for response and optimize business operations in real time.
• AI TRiSM supports AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, efficacy and data protection. It combines methods for explaining AI results, rapidly deploying new models, actively managing AI security, and controls for privacy and ethics issues.

Theme 2: Scale

These technology trends accelerate vertical offerings, increase the pace of product delivery and enable connectivity everywhere. 

• Industry Cloud Platforms combine SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with tailored, industry-specific functionality that organizations can use to more easily adapt to the relentless stream of disruptions in their industry.
• Platform Engineering provides a curated set of tools, capabilities and processes that are packaged for easy consumption by developers and end users. It will increase end users’ productivity and reduce the burden on development teams. 
• Wireless-Value Realization covers the provision of wireless network services from everything, including traditional end-user computing, support for edge devices, digital tagging solutions, etc. Such networks go well beyond pure connectivity, providing location and other real-time information and insight from analytics, and allow systems to harvest network energy directly.

Theme 3: Pioneer

These trends focus on enabling business model change, reinventing engagement with employees and customers, and accelerating strategies to tap new virtual markets.

• Superapps are more than composite applications that aggregate services. A superapp combines the features of an app, a platform and an ecosystem in one application, providing a platform for third parties to develop and publish their own miniapps on.
• Adaptive AI allows for model behavior change post-deployment by using real-time feedback, to continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments, based on new data and adjusted goals, to adapt quickly to changing real-world circumstances.
• Metaverse allows people to replicate or enhance their physical activities. This could happen by transporting or extending physical activities to a virtual world or by transforming the physical one. It is a combinatorial innovation made up of multiple technology themes and capabilities.

Theme 4: Sustainable Technology

Delivering technology alone will not be enough in 2023. Sustainable technology is a framework of solutions that increases the energy and efficiency of IT services; enables enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, analytics, emissions management software and AI; and helps customers achieve their own sustainability objectives. 

Investments in sustainable technology also have the potential to create greater operational resiliency and financial performance, while providing new avenues for growth.

In short:

• Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends will help fulfill your business needs to optimize, scale or pioneer.
• The trends allow you to align your technology innovation with the future strategic objectives of your enterprise.
• Investments in sustainable technology provide operational and financial benefits, and can create growth opportunities.