AI, cloud, hybrid work headline Gartner's top tech trends for 2022

CIOs are tooling up an assembly line of technologies to get back to business in 2022, including a mix of solutions leaned on heavily to weather the pandemic and new offerings aimed at making the most of emerging opportunities as the pandemic subsides. At its virtual IT Symposium/Xpo this week, Gartner identified the top tech strategies it sees CIOs embracing next year, including the "distributed enterprise," advanced AI, hyperautomation, cloud-native platforms, decision intelligence, and advanced security, among others. Tying together these trends is the C-suite's ongoing recognition of IT as an engine for business transformation. "The two top business priorities for CEOs going into 2022 are scaling digitation and building ecommerce, with the aim of getting back to business," said David Groombridge, research vice president at Gartner, noting that CIO priorities will vary depending on whether they are tasked with driving consumer revenue or building products. But all CIOs will have common set of technology priorities, the analyst predicts.