Written by Andrew Wooden
Analyst firm Gartner has highlighted a series of emerging technologies peaking their heads over the horizon, and says AI will have a ‘profound impact on business and society.’
Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies’ lists various bleeding edge tech areas and positions them on a life cycle from early innovation towards maturity and a point where they are actually a productive thing. It is a distillation of insights about ‘2,000 technologies and applied frameworks’ that Gartner generates in a year into a shortlist of ‘must know’ emerging technologies.
Once technology emerges into the world, it goes through a ‘period of inflated expectations’ followed by a ‘trough of disillusionment’, and then a ‘slope of enlightenment’ – according to Gartner’s rather flamboyantly phrased model.
It places generative AI at the present moment at the peak of the ‘period of inflated expectations’, which seems to mean there’s a lot of hype around it right now, but projects that it will reach ‘transformational benefit within two to five years.’
