The technology trends that will drive growth, scale digitalization and act as force multipliers over the next three to five years
In 2022, CEOs have three priorities: growth, digitalization and efficiency. The past 18 months have accelerated the need for digital technologies, and organizations need to adapt more quickly to ever-changing conditions.

The Gartner top strategic technology trends are key to delivering on your CEO’s priorities. Each trend provides a competitive edge, and they build on and reinforce one another.
These are not simply technologies, they are a strategic roadmap to differentiating your organization from your peers over the next three to five years.
These technology trends fulfill business objectives and position CIOs and IT executives as strategic partners in the organization.

“CEOs know they must accelerate the adoption of digital business in the new world and are seeking more direct digital routes to connect with their customers,” says David Groombridge, VP Analyst, Gartner. “But with an eye on future economic risks, they also want to be efficient and protect margins and cash flow.”

The twelve technology trends fall under three main themes:

Engineering Trust: Technologies in this segment create a more resilient and efficient IT foundation by ensuring data is integrated and processed more securely across cloud and non-cloud environments, to deliver cost-efficient scaling of the IT foundation.

Sculpting Change: By releasing the creative new-technology solutions in this area, you can scale and accelerate your organization’s digitalization. These technology trends allow you to respond to the increasing pace of change by creating applications more rapidly to automate business activities, optimize artificial intelligence (AI) and enable quicker, smarter decisions.

Accelerating Growth: By capitalizing on strategic technology trends in this segment, you’re unleashing IT force multipliers that will win business and market share. Together, these trends enable you to maximize value creation and enhance digital capabilities.

This year’s list features twelve top technology trends:

Trend 1: Data Fabric

Data fabric provides a flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, making data available everywhere it’s needed regardless where the data lives.
The true business value of data fabric exists in its ability to use analytics to learn and actively recommend where data should be used and changed. This can reduce data management efforts by up to 70%.

How It's Used Today:
The Finnish city of Turku found its innovation held back by gaps in its data. By integrating fragmented data assets, it was able to reuse data, reduce time to market by two-thirds, and create a monetizable data fabric.

Trend 2: Cybersecurity Mesh

Cybersecurity mesh is a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services. Cybersecurity mesh enables best-of-breed, stand-alone security solutions to work together to improve overall security while moving control points closer to the assets they’re designed to protect. It can quickly and reliably verify identity, context and policy adherence across cloud and noncloud environments.

How It's Used Today:
An organization in the technology space was struggling to create value from its threat intelligence program. Using a cybersecurity mesh approach, they integrated multiple data feeds from distinct security products to better identify and respond more quickly to incidents.

Trend 3: Privacy-Enhancing Computation

Privacy-enhancing computation secures the processing of personal data in untrusted environments. Evolving privacy and data protection laws as well as growing consumer concerns are driving this trend, which utilizes a variety of privacy-protection techniques to allow value to be extracted from data while meeting compliance requirements.

How It's Used Today:
DeliverFund is a U.S.-based nonprofit with a mission to tackle human trafficking. Its platforms use homomorphic encryption so partners can conduct data searches against its extremely sensitive data, with both the search and the results being encrypted. In this way, partners can submit sensitive queries without having to expose personal or regulated data at any point.

Trend 4: Cloud-Native Platforms

Cloud-native platforms are technologies that allow you to build new application architectures that are resilient, elastic and agile — enabling you to respond to rapid digital change. This improves on the traditional lift-and-shift approach to cloud, which fails to take advantage of the benefits of cloud and adds complexity to maintenance.

How It's Used Today:
A major Indian bank built a cloud-native platform to create a portfolio of new digital financial services. The bank was able to reduce the time to open an account to just 6 minutes and add instant digital payments.
Deployment of a new microservices architecture enabled the integration of savings, virtual debit card, and credit card services, allowing the system to easily scale to over 3.5 million transactions in two months.

Trend 5: Composable Applications

Composable applications are built from business-centric modular components, making it easier to use and reuse code, accelerating the time to market for new software solutions and releasing enterprise value.

How It's Used Today:
Ally Bank has created PBCs representing repeatable capabilities such as fraud alerts, which its fusion teams can assemble in low-code environments, saving over 200,000 hours of manual effort.

Trend 6: Decision Intelligence

Decision intelligence is a practical approach to improve organizational decision making. It models each decision as a set of processes, using intelligence and analytics to inform, learn from and refine decisions. Decision intelligence can support and augment human decision making and, potentially, automate it through the use of augmented analytics, simulations and AI.

How It's Used Today:
Product-centric organizations can create a competitive edge in strategic product decisions by using decision intelligence to analyze competitor strategies and evaluate historic decisions.

Trend 7: Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is a disciplined, business-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible — enabling scalability, remote operation and business model disruption.

How It's Used Today:
A global oil and gas company has 14 concurrent hyper-automation initiatives. These initiatives include targeted task automation, industrializing over 90 different areas including intelligent document processing, and automation of geoscience and offshore oil drilling operations. Decisions on what to automate are made strategically and are premised on targeted business outcomes for either quality, time to market, business agility, or innovation for new business models.

Trend 8: AI Engineering

AI engineering aims to optimize the value of production AI solutions by automating updates to data, models and applications to streamline AI delivery. Combined with strong AI governance, it will operationalize the delivery of AI to ensure its ongoing business value.
How It's Used Today:

Unity Health Hospital in Toronto recognizes that AI credibility is critical for acceptance by its physicians. Its fusion teams work to build trust by showing physicians the reliability of AI results — and the gaps.

Trend 9: Distributed Enterprises

Distributed enterprises reflect a digital-first, remote-first business model to improve remote employee experiences, digitalize consumer and partner touchpoints, and build out product experiences. An increase in remotely located employees and consumers is growing demand for virtual services and hybrid workplaces.
How It's Used Today:

Armoire’s digital dressing room allows customers to try styles virtually.
Merrill Lynch uses geolocation to enable clients to find a nearby financial advisor.
Enterprise drone usage will rise a hundredfold in the next 10 years to support remote customers.

Trend 10: Total Experience

Total experience is a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience and multiexperience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth. The goal of total experience is to drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, through holistic management of stakeholder experiences.

How It's Used Today: Fidelity Spire uses a total experience approach in its financial services. Analytics and AI learn client behaviors to proactively respond to a client’s next action and to create realistic training simulations for staff. Unified identity services help clients move easily through self-service onboarding and provide integration to the advisor’s view, across multiple touchpoints.

Trend 11: Autonomic Systems

Autonomic systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn from their environments and dynamically modify their own algorithms in real time to optimize their behavior in complex ecosystems. This creates an agile set of technology capabilities, able to support new requirements and situations, optimize performance and defend against attacks without human intervention.

How It's Used Today:
Ericsson manages thousands of cellular phone masts in complex environments. Its autonomic systems use reinforcement learning and digital twins to dynamically optimize 5G network performance.

Trend 12: Generative AI

Generative AI learns about artifacts from data, and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but don’t repeat it. This technology has the potential to create new forms of creative content like videos or writing and accelerate R&D cycles in fields ranging from medicine to product creation.

How It's Used Today:
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has used generative AI to create synthetic payment data, from 5 million records of real payment data. The synthetic dataset will be used to create new fraud models without revealing individuals’ data.