Gartner Spotlights AI, Security in 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech

Enterprises should be paying attention to emerging technologies — but they also need to strategize on how to exploit these technologies in line with their ability to handle unproven technologies, Gartner said.

Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2024" released this week, covers autonomous artificial intelligence (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 incorporate these technologies into the enterprise. 

Gartner positioned generative AI technology over the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," highlighting the need for enterprises to consider what return on investment these systems provide. Just last year, organizations were jumping on anything that included generative AI. Now organizations are slowing down to evaluate these technologies against their specific environments and requirements.

"First and foremost, you have to gauge your maturity before you deploy technology," says Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. "A technology may work very well in one organization but may not work well in another organization."

In the cybersecurity arena, Gartner calls out human-centric security and privacy, urging organizations to develop resilience by creating a culture of mutual trust and shared risk. Security controls often rely on the premise that humans behave securely, when the reality is that employees will bypass too-stringent security controls in order to complete their business tasks.

Getting humans involved early in the technology deployment life cycle and giving teams adequate training can help them work in a more synchronous way with security technology, Chandrasekaran says .  

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, according to Gartner.

AI Hype Is Sky High

When it comes to autonomous AI technologies that can operate with minimal human oversight — such as multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning — technology leaders should temper their expectations.

"While the technologies are advancing very rapidly, the expectations and hype around these technologies is also sky-high, which means that there's going to be some level of unhappiness. There's going to be some level of disillusionment. That's inevitable, not because the technology is bad but because of our expectations around it," Chandrasekaran says. "In the near term, we're going to see some recalibration in terms of expectations, and some failures in that domain are inevitable."

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

"We cannot deploy technology for technology's sake," Chandrasekaran says. "We have to really deploy it in a manner where the technologies are functioning in a more harmonious way with human beings, and the human beings are trained on the adequate and the appropriate usage of those technologies."

The "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies" is culled from the analysis of more than 2,000 technologies that Gartner says have the potential to deliver "transformational benefits" over the next two to 10 years.