Artificial intelligence, “transparently immersive experiences” and digital platforms will lead a crowded roster of emerging technologies for the next five to 10 years.

So says analyst firm Gartner Inc., which has just published its latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. It’s one of the research firm’s most eagerly anticipated reports, because it provides insights into up-and-coming technologies that have the potential to deliver a significant competitive advantage to businesses wielding them adroitly.

With regard to the three megatrends, Gartner says these will provide organizations with “unrivaled intelligence, create profoundly new experiences and offer platforms that allow organizations to connect with new business ecosystems.”

Gartner singled out AI as the most promising of the three megatrends, saying it will be “the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years due to radical computational power, near-endless amounts of data, and unprecedented advances in deep neural networks.” These factors will combine to enable organizations using AI to harness data and adapt to new situations, and to “solve problems that no one has encountered previously,” Gartner added.

The second megatrend on Gartner’s list is transparently immersive experiences, which are “human centric” technologies capable of introducing “transparency between people, businesses and things,” Gartner said. Examples of the widely ranging category include 4D printing, augmented reality, computer-brain interface, connected homes, human augmentation, nanotube electronics, virtual reality and volumetric displays.

The last of the megatrends, digital platforms, relates to new “ecosystem-enabling” platforms that can lay the foundations for entirely new business models that form a kind of bridge between humans and technology, Gartner said. Some of the hottest technologies in this category include 5G networks, Digital Twins, which are virtual models of processes, products and services. The similarly expansive category also includes edge computing, blockchain, Internet of Things platforms, quantum computing and serverless platform-as-a-service.

“When we view these themes together, we can see how the human-centric enabling technologies within transparently immersive experiences — such as smart workspace, connected home, augmented reality, virtual reality and the growing brain-computer interface — are becoming the edge technologies that are pulling the other trends along the Hype Cycle,” Mike J. Walker, a research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

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