Autonomous AI, developer productivity, total experience, as well as human-centric security and privacy programmes have reached the height of their hype, according to Gartner.

The analysis frim has released their 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which tracks the rise, and potentially the fall, of new technologies as they travel along the undulating graph of human perception and adoption.

Generative AI (genAI) has peaked in terms of its inflated expectations, meaning that the technology will now truly be tested as investors and adopters look for results.

“Generative AI (GenAI) is over the Peak of Inflated Expectations as business focus continues to shift from excitement around foundation models to use cases that drive ROI,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

“This is accelerating autonomous AI. While the current generation of AI models lack agency, AI research labs are rapidly releasing agents which can dynamically interact with their environment to achieve goals, although this development will be a gradual process.

“Even as AI continues to grab the attention, CIOs and other IT executives must also examine other emerging technologies with transformational potential for developers, security and customer and employee experience and strategize how to exploit these technologies in line with their organizations’ ability to handle unproven technologies,” said Chandrasekaran.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies distills insights from more than 2,000 technologies to track their progress as they are adopted into the mainstream.

Four themes have emerged from this year’s hype cycle.

Autonomous AI

AI’s fast evolution is producing autonomous AI systems that can operate with minimal human oversight, improve themselves and become effective at decision-making in complex environments.

These advanced AI systems that can perform any task a human can perform are beginning to move slowly from science fiction to reality. These technologies include multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning.

Developer Productivity

Developer productivity is about more than writing code quickly. It’s influenced by developer’s effective communication and collaboration, and their feeling of energised focus, full involvement and enjoyment.

“Technology is revolutionizing the way developers design and deliver software, making them more productive than ever,” said Chandrasekaran. “It’s ensuring they deliver higher-quality products quickly while maximizing gains by improving developer satisfaction, collaboration, and flow.”

Emerging technologies enabling developer productivity include AI-augmented software engineering, cloud-native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering and WebAssembly.

Recommended reading

• 75% of Enterprises Push Ahead With AI, Despite Data Governance Concerns
• 64% of People Don’t Want Companies to Use AI in Customer Service
• Comment | What AI Adopters in Scotland Can Learn From the dot-com Bubble

Total Experience

Total experience is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining customer experience, employee experience, multi-experience and user experience practices.

It uses technology to address critical interactions, empowering both customers and employees, with the goal of driving greater confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Technologies to assess include digital twin of a customer, spatial computing, superapps and 6G.

Human-centric Security and Privacy

Organizations will become more resilient by using security and privacy techniques that create a culture of mutual trust and awareness of shared risks between teams.

“Security practices too often rely on the premise that humans can behave in a completely safe and secure way. But when employees must make a choice between security and business delivery, they often choose business delivery, sometimes bypassing too-stringent security controls,” said Chandrasekaran. “Human-centric security and privacy weaves a tight security and privacy fabric into the organization’s digital design.”

Emerging technologies supporting human-centric security and privacy include AI TRiSM, cybersecurity mesh architecture, digital immune system, disinformation security, federated machine learning and homomorphic encryption.