Top trends coming in 2018

Kathy Gibson at Gartner Symposium, Cape Town -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more pervasive -- and it is starting to enable intelligent apps and things. This is among the trends that we can look forward to in 2018, according to Gartner's list of the top 10 technology trends. Brian Burke, vice-president and head of research at Gartner, refers to the intelligent digital mesh as the overarching concept. Intelligent refers to technology that is becoming more insightful and aware of context; digital is about technology that spans the digital and physical world, becoming immersive and more autonomous; and mesh talks to the enabling underlying technologies that are enabling these trends, while making them dynamic and secure. "Each of these -- intelligence, digital and mesh -- will have a different impact on your organisation -- you need to analyse how you can use them to increase your competitive advantage -- or how your competitors will use them to displace you. "These are not standalone technologies: the combinatorial effect will have the most impact on your business, your industry and the world overall." By 2020, 30% of CIOs will have AI as one of their top five investment priorities; while 40% of new development projects will have AI components delivered by joint teams of data scientists and programmers. "We think it will be a bit like electricity was 100 years ago: we will add it to just about everything that we do.