Gartner Predicts 'Digital Immune Systems' and Virtual Metaverse Workspaces

Gartner, the prestigious tech research and consulting firm, has released its annual predictions for "strategic tech trends" in the coming year. Forbes offers a summary. Some highlights: Digital Immune Systems. [A]ntiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience. Applied Observability. The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization's "most precious monetizable asset" and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage. "By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization," Forbes writes. But they also note that Gartner is predicting platform engineering - "a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes" to speed up and optimize development. "Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams." They're also predicting "adaptive" AI that can change after being deployed. But Forbes summarizes Gartner's related prediction, that AI leaders "increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations" to improve adoption and user acceptance. This will include tools that "make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security." PC Magazine offers this summary of a related prediction from Gartner: "By 2025, without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the average European country, offsetting any environmental gains that AI creates by 25%." Gartner also predicts a phasing out of marketing that uses social media sites' data about individuals - and that fully virtual workspaces "will account for 30% of the investment growth in metaverse technologies and will 'reimagine' the office experience through 2027," writes PC Magazine:[Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer] said people need to reimagine how work will be done. He said that few people want to go back to the office full-time, but that virtual participants in calls often feel like second-class citizens. A fully immersive world is an answer to this, he said, with the interactive experience more important than information exchange. He believes metaverse experiences will be where people collaborate in ways they couldn't do in the office, blurring the line between home and work. By 2025, "labor volatility" will cause 40% of organizations to report a material business loss, forcing a shift in talent strategy from acquisition to resilience. Plummer talked about revamping the way talent is valued. He said people don't want to do just one thing, but want to be "versatilists," which makes them more valuable to the company and less likely to leave.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.