Upper management still doesn’t get connected devices, a new survey by Gartner asserts. The research firm found that the majority of CEOs dismiss the potentially massive impact of smart machines on business as mere hype.

Asked about the prospect of the Internet of Things absorbing millions of jobs over the next 15 years, 60 percent of the respondents deemed it a “”futurist fantasy.” Kenneth Brant, a research director at Gartner, commented on the results:

“Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades. Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

Gartner, like SiliconANGLE and others in the industry, believes that the emergence of connected device will combine the physical world and the virtual world, driving productivity on an unprecedented scale. For this reason, the firm listed smart machines among the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014.

Smart machines fall under the burgeoning Internet of Everything umbrella, a broad term that encompasses everything from embedded sensors to smart appliances. Gartner predicts that the total economic value of this segment will reach $1.9 trillion dollars in 2020, thanks in large part to the rapid adoption of networked machinery and mobile devices.

Mobile, the first trend on the firm’s Top 10, is set to change the way organizations manage their workforces. Gartner advises CIOs to evaluate and update their BYOD policies to accommodate the growing variety of employee-owned hardware that gets plugged into the corporate network.

Apps also earned a spot on the list. Improved JavaScript performance is expected to establish HTML5 and the browser as a mainstream enterprise application development environment.