Gartner 2024 Emerging Tech Curve: How Autonomous AI Will Transform Enterprises

Gartner’s 2024 Emerging Technology Maturity Curve identifies 25 disruptive technologies across four major domains: autonomous AI, developer productivity, holistic experience, and human‑centric security and privacy.

Gartner Distinguished Research Vice President Arun Chandrasekaran notes that as enterprises shift focus from foundational models to use cases that improve ROI, generative AI (GenAI) is about to exit the hype phase. This accelerates the development of autonomous AI, which, while still lacking full self‑action capability, is seeing rapid advances in intelligent agents that interact dynamically with environments.

He adds that CIOs and other IT leaders must explore emerging technologies that could transform developers, enterprise security, and customer and employee experiences, and devise strategies based on their organization’s tolerance for unproven tech.

Among Gartner’s many technology maturity curves, the emerging‑technology curve is unique, annually selecting from over 2,000 technologies and frameworks those that enterprises need to understand, with the expectation that they will deliver significant competitive advantage within two to ten years.

Four Themes of Emerging Technology Trends

Autonomous AI

Rapid AI evolution is spawning autonomous AI systems that can operate with minimal human supervision, continuously self‑improve, and make effective decisions in complex environments. These advanced AI systems aim to perform any task humans can, moving from science‑fiction toward reality. Technologies include multi‑agent systems, large‑action models, machine customers, humanoid robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning.

Developer Productivity

Factors influencing developer productivity extend beyond coding speed to include effective communication, collaboration, and sustained focus (“flow state”). Chandrasekaran states that technology is transforming software design and delivery, enabling unprecedented productivity, higher‑quality products, increased developer satisfaction, better collaboration, and maximized returns. Relevant technologies include AI‑augmented software engineering, cloud‑native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering, and WebAssembly.

Holistic Experience

Holistic experience combines customer, employee, multi‑experience, and user‑experience practices to create outstanding shared experiences. It leverages technology to solve key interaction challenges, empowering customers and employees, and boosting confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Technologies include customer digital twins, spatial computing, super‑apps, and 6G.

Human‑Centric Security and Privacy

Enterprises can use security and privacy technologies to foster a culture of trust and shared risk, enhancing overall resilience. Chandrasekaran notes that while security traditionally assumes perfect compliance, in practice employees may bypass strict controls to meet business goals. Human‑centric security and privacy integrate tightly with digital design. Technologies include AI trust, risk, and security management (AI TRiSM), cybersecurity mesh architecture, digital immune systems, misinformation defense, federated learning, and homomorphic encryption.

Source: Gartner