Samantha Searle (Gartner): Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2017

Disruption — It's great when you're the disruptor, but it's scary when you're the one being disrupted. The world is becoming an intelligent, digitally enabled mesh of people, things and services. Ordinary people will experience a digitally enabled world where the lines between what's real and what's digital truly blur. AI and machine learning will be used to enhance analytics, actions and interfaces of nearly every technology-enabled system. New digital business models are emerging, and new ecosystems are forming to realign business and customer relationships.

The status quo won't hold. Rich digital services will be delivered to everything, and intelligence will be embedded in everything, creating an intelligent digital experience for people and organizations. Underneath these changes, big shifts in the enabling technologies and IT best practices create a mesh of technology building blocks to support the intelligent digital experience and resulting digital business ecosystems.

We call this disruptive set of strategic technology trends the intelligent digital mesh, and this forms the basis for our top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017. Strategic trends are those with broad and potentially disruptive impacts that are reaching key tipping points and demand a fresh look as part of strategic business and technology planning. The intelligent digital mesh is a foundation for future digital business and its ecosystems. To create competitive advantage, IT leaders must factor into their technology innovation strategies the disruptive trends related to the mesh, or risk losing ground to those that do.

In this presentation, we explore:
*The role AI and advanced machine learning will play in the digital future
*The opportunities the blending of the digital and physical worlds brings
*How the increasing complexity of connections between people, organizations and technology-based systems changes the user experience and supporting IT models