The pandemic’s push to remote and hybrid work will drive a raft of new distributed data and services and more automation over the next five to 10 years.

That’s among the predictions tech industry analyst firm Gartner Inc. made today as it kicked off its virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas event. They’re on its annual list of technology trends that it believes will drive significant disruption and opportunity for up to the next decade

Shaped by the impacts of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many of the trends highlighted today are expected to grow in support of new, hybrid workforces and the challenges they continue to create. First and foremost, Gartner said there’s a need to recognize how remote work is evolving organizations into “Distributed Enterprises” comprised of geographically dispersed workers.

Gartner Research Vice President David Groombridge said chief information officers have already made major technical and service changes to ensure a frictionless work experience for these new workforces. Now, though, there’s a growing realization of the impact these distributed teams have on organization’s business models.

Delivery models “have to be reconfigured to embrace distributed services,” Groombridge said. “The world didn’t think it would be trying on clothes in a digital dressing room two years ago.”

As those business models change, enterprises are also in need of a technology architecture that’s able to support fast, safe and efficient application change, Gartner said. Hence the sudden rise of “Composable Applications,” which is where the functional blocks of an app can be decoupled and finely tuned to create new applications that are greater than the sum of its parts. According to Gartner, organizations that adopt such an approach to building applications will outpace their competitors by as much as 80% in terms of new feature implementation.

Remote work is also driving the rapid adoption of “Cloud-Native Platforms,” where technology and infrastructure is increasingly provided “as a service” to ensure faster time to value and reduced costs. Gartner said cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation of more than 95% of all new digital initiatives by 2025, up from just 40% today.

The distributed nature of today’s enterprises has created more urgency around privacy and cybersecurity too, leading to the emergence of “Privacy-Enhancing Computation” techniques that protect personal and sensitive information as the data, software or hardware level.

Similarly, more enterprises are expected to adopt a “Cybersecurity Mesh,” which is a security infrastructure that, rather than focusing on building a single “perimeter” around all devices or nodes of an IT network, instead establishes smaller, individual perimeters around each device or access point. The cybersecurity mesh is an extension of zero-trust security, but it should be a worthwhile investment as Gartner reckons those that implement it can reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.

Data integration to drive AI + decision-making

Also getting more distributed by the day is the massive amounts of data enterprises collect. Gartner says the surge in data and application siloes has led to growing adoption of so-called “Data Fabrics,” which are flexible, resilient integrations of information across platforms and users that aim to simplify data integration.

“A data fabric’s real value is its ability to dynamically improve data usage with its inbuilt analytics, cutting data management efforts by up to 70% and accelerating time to value,” Groombridge said.

As data becomes more accessible, organizations are increasingly tapping that information to aid their decision making processes. But the sheer amount of data means that it’s harder than ever to come to those decisions. Hence the rise of the “Decision Intelligence” discipline that aims to explicitly understand and engineer how decisions are made and outcomes are evaluated, managed and improved by feedback.

Likewise, data is powering ever-smarter artificial intelligence systems, chief among them “Generative Artificial Intelligence” algorithms. Generative AI refers to models that are able to take existing content such as text and audio files and use it to create similar but entirely original content. Such models can be used to write software code, facilitate drug development and create targeted marketing campaigns, and will account for 10% of all data produced by 2025, up from less than 1% today, Gartner said.

In turn, the rise of generative AI will help to advance the idea of “AI Engineering,” which Gartner defines as a more integrated approach to operationalizing AI models.

“By 2025, the 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than the 90% of enterprises that do not,” Groombridge said.

Enterprise automation accelerates

AI is also expected to power a revolution in automation over the next five years, according to Gartner. Groombridge explained that the traditional programming and simple automation practiced by enterprises today cannot scale, so they will give rise to what are known as “Autonomic Systems” that are self-managing and able to learn from their environments. Such systems can dynamically modify their own algorithms without the need for a software update, enabling them to rapidly adapt to new conditions in the field in the same way that humans do.

Groombridge says autonomic systems have already been deployed in some of the more complex enterprise security environments, and will soon start showing up in physical systems such as robots, drones, manufacturing machines and smart spaces.

They will also help to cement the adoption of “Hyperautomation” in the enterprise, Gartner believes. Hyperautomation is an approach that enterprises to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and information technology processes as possible.

“Gartner research shows that the top-performing hyperautomation teams focus on three key priorities: improving the quality of work, speeding up business processes and enhancing the agility of decision-making,” said Groombridge.

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