Companies need to pay attention to emerging technologies, but they also need to devise a strategy for leveraging these technologies in line with their ability to deal with unproven technologies, Gartner said.

Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, released this week, covers autonomous AI, developer productivity, total experience, and human-centric security and privacy. Cybersecurity leaders can benefit most by knowing their organizations — and their strengths and weaknesses — before deciding how to integrate these technologies into the enterprise.

Gartner positioned Generative AI technology above the “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” highlighting the need for enterprises to consider the return on investment these systems will deliver. As recently as last year, organizations were jumping on anything that included Generative AI. Now, organizations are taking the time to evaluate these technologies against their specific environments and requirements.

“First of all, you need to measure your maturity before you implement any technology,” says Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “A technology may work very well in one organization but not in another.”

In cybersecurity, Gartner calls for people-centric security and privacy, and urges organizations to develop resilience by creating a culture of mutual trust and shared risk. Security controls are often based on the premise that people will behave safely, when the reality is that employees bypass overly strict security controls to perform their business tasks.

Involving people early in the technology implementation lifecycle and training teams adequately can help them work in better sync with security technology, Chandrasekaran says.

According to Gartner, emerging technologies that support human-centric security and privacy include AI TRiSM, cybersecurity mesh architecture, digital immune system, disinformation protection, federated machine learning and homomorphic encryption.

AI hype is sky high

When it comes to autonomous AI technologies that can function with minimal human oversight, such as multi-agent systems, large action models, machine clients, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning, technology leaders should temper their expectations.

“As technologies evolve at a rapid pace, the expectations and hype around these technologies are also sky-high, which means there will be a certain level of dissatisfaction. There will be a certain level of disillusionment. That is inevitable, not because the technology is bad, but because of our expectations around it,” Chandrasekaran says. “In the short term, we will see some recalibration in terms of expectations, and some failures in that area are inevitable.”

Gartner’s Hype Cycle also focuses on tools that can increase developer productivity, including AI-assisted software engineering, cloud-native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering and WebAssembly.

“We cannot use technology for the sake of technology. We really need to use it in a way where the technologies function more harmoniously with people, and people are trained in the adequate and appropriate use of those technologies,” Chandrasekaran says.

The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is compiled from analysis of more than 2,000 technologies that Gartner says have the potential to deliver “transformative benefits” over the next two to 10 years.