Gartner releases its trends report each year to share the technologies that will dominate the upcoming year. Their research keeps business leaders across industries informed about how technology will shape the business world in the near future. The Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 is a tool for effective decision-making related to technology investments.
What’s novel today can shape industry expectations and consumer preferences down the line. But tech stacks bloat fast when you try to invest in everything. Gartner’s research narrows the focus. And it’s no surprise that 4 out of the 10 Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 are all about AI.
Next, look at our Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 highlights.
Platform Engineering and Developer Platforms
Within Platform Engineering, one main feature is offering the team a developer platform that centralizes standards, configurations, and even code snippets to make the development cycle faster and more efficient.
In a developer platform, layers are maintained by dedicated product teams. This ensures that the developers interacting within that layer have the best possible experiences with the tools and resources in that layer, speeding up development and improving the overall quality of output.
Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 predicts that “by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.”
Why This Matters for Software Engineering Leadership
This approach speeds the delivery of value the developers support to drive revenues and meet business goals. It allows platform teams to share reusable components and tools within a developer platform. Teams can continually analyze and engineer tools and resources the users need to get the most out of the platform.
The layered approach reduces the cognitive load on one developer or development team. Yes. Product experience should be unified. But that experience is now massive and multi-faceted. A layered platform development strategy allows teams to specialize and focus to achieve optimized user experiences.
Accelerate Creation: AI-Augmented Development
Years from now, 2023 may be seen as year 1 in advancing generative AI. It’s been a long time in the making, and we’ve seen many iterations with varying levels of success before that year.
But finally, it’s catching up with our imagination and allowing us to create something entirely new at more or less a touch of a button. At this point, we’ve advanced to the point where the AI itself can make better generative AI.
It can run tests, train itself with machine learning, and automatically apply fixes. It helps software engineers develop tools faster with:
- Design-to-Code Tools AI
- Coding Assistance
- AI-Augmented Testing Tools
- Context-based suggestions
Gartner believes, “By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants.” At the beginning of 2023, that rate was barely 10%.
Why This Matters
What was once a series of tedious and often mind-numbing tasks can now be automated. This:
- Increases programmer productivity
- Reduces all-night project hours
- Helps companies more quickly address their most pressing problems through technology solutions
Your software engineers can spend less time writing code. Now, they spend more time thinking expansively about what’s possible with the right technologies. They can develop the best way to solve business problems through technology. You can respond to business trends and demands more quickly, creating a more agile business response.
Tailor Your Tailor’s Work: Industry Cloud Platforms
Industry cloud platforms can deliver targeted solutions to business problems by unifying PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software), and IaaS (Infrastructure) into a single product experience that offers companies the building blocks to have a developer create their own tailored software solutions.
What does the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 say about it? They anticipate, “By 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.” That rate currently stands below 15%.
Why This Matters
Software engineers delivering B2B technology innovations have been saying for years that every business is different and that they deliver custom solutions. But until now, developing individual solutions for every customer was both time- and cost-prohibitive.
This technology trend improves code reuse, which provides measurable productivity gains over infrastructure. Development teams become more agile and can deploy more confidently.
Once again, AI is helping software engineers create endlessly customizable building blocks. Through them, your team can generate a 100% tailored product across:
- Industries
- Sectors
- Business priorities
- Customer preferences
- Individual business models
Are you still reusing your best code? Of course, you are, but AI-enhanced cloud platforms are making it easier to deliver the custom solutions businesses need faster.
Intelligent Applications
AI uses connected data across integrated sources to enhance the function of applications. AI and machine learning help these applications identify discrepancies to deliver clean data. They can then use this intelligence to:
- Spot automation opportunities
- Apply automation across a wider swath of use cases
- Test assumptions
- Tweak application performance through machine learning
- Generate highly contextual predictions
In the end, these applications continually teach themselves to do more. This helps companies you support to get more and more out of their investment in intelligent applications. Plus, they see the ROI on other software that smarter technology interacts with.
Gartner expects that “30% of new apps will use AI to drive personalized adaptive user interfaces.” You may be surprised to learn it’s only 5% today.
Why This Matters
Many companies are faced with bloated tech stacks. They have too many cooks in the kitchen and no source of truth.
Intelligent applications can cut through the clutter, combine data, and identify opportunities to expand their capabilities. It can make better predictions and recommend improvements tailored to business goals.
How StackSpot helps your company be ahead of the trends
StackSpot is an Enterprise Developer Platform that empowers engineering teams to modernize legacy systems and deliver value faster by distributing technology patterns, optimizing the cloud journey, and generating highly contextualized code through AI.
It turns even the most complex development environment into a place where your developers can confidently build technology solutions. You can lead the team that drives real business results with tools like these:
- Developer Platform. Speed ideation, creation, and distribution by standardizing technologies within each context.
- AI Assistant. Proceed confidently with high-quality, context-based suggestions to boost productivity and optimize the developer experience. Get assertive code suggestions to catch bugs and speed up the development process.
- Cloud Services. Work within a transparent ecosystem with dashboards, analytics, alerts, cost-efficiency data, and more. Enhance efficiency by creating, storing, and reusing your best code tailored to individual application needs.
Want to understand more about Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024? Then watch this episode of Stack Insights:
Platform Engineering and AI: the hottest trends in technology | Stack Insights
Stay ahead with our highlights of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024
These top strategic trends demonstrate the efficient ways software developers will be using AI in 2024. You’ll leverage it to enhance team productivity, enable customer journeys, and get better results for the companies they support.
It further showcases how quickly these technologies will become commonplace in the workplace. These technologies will define software development leadership and team roles in the coming years.
StackSpot helps you quickly and effectively integrate industry-defining trends into your projects to enhance team performance and results.
Can you think of someone who needs to see how AI will transform development in 2024? Please share this post with someone who needs to hear it.
