IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence and seek technologies that can help them optimize resilience, scale industry-specific solutions and product delivery, and pioneer new forms of engagement, according to the 10 top strategic technology trends for 2023 unveiled at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2022. These include multiple forms of wireless, artificial intelligence, and sustainability, according to Frances Karamouzis, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, and external events are making IT pros' decisions about them even more difficult. "Depending on what region of the world you are in there are lots of looming issues such as a potential recession, supply chain concerns, the war in Ukraine and that impact, as well as energy-related issues," Karamouzis said. IT executives must focus on continuing to accelerate digital transformation and consider possible use both for technologies that can be applied immediately and those that are on the horizon. With that as background, Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2023 looks like this: No single wireless technology will dominate, but enterprises will use a variety of wireless solutions to support a range of environments, from Wi-Fi in the office, services for mobile devices, low-power protocols, and even radio connectivity, Gartner stated.

Speaking in a webinar released in August by Gartner, "Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Growing Pains & Realities," Karamouzis said that while studying the market for the past three or so years, she has seen it grow from a less than $100 million market to an estimated $750 million to $1 billion, and that's only in product license sales. Adoption rates for RPA have also gone up, she said, particularly in fields like HR and finance. Currently, there are about 70 software companies that offer some kind of RPA product, Karamouzis said. While there are a few large organizations in that mix, most of the companies are smaller players. That's something to consider when looking at vendors and planning a company's RPA strategy, she noted.

It's now a strategic imperative that business leaders conceptualize how business and IT services can be bundled with "smart" technologies, like cognitive computing or machine learning, to create innovative service models and intellectual property (IP) for new revenue streams. Speaking ahead of the Gartner Sourcing & Strategic Vendor Relationships Summit 2016 in London, Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said, "Smart machines are not future fantasy. They are commercially available -- it has been estimated that more than 10 billion of smart machine technologies have already been purchased through more than 2,500 companies. Services related to smart machines may be five to 10 times the size of the aggregate technology market. The new normal is that "recruited" smart algorithms, smart machines, robots and cognitive bots (with artificial intelligence) will occupy the domains of expertise historically fulfilled by people.

In a world of smart machines that can drive cars, beat humans at chess, advise on medical diagnoses and perform a host of other tasks, imagine the next likely step as a smart machine as a people manager. As business investment in smart machines grows, "robobosses" will increasingly make workplace decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by robobosses, according to Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. These smart machine managers will look at data derived from worker performance in new ways because of their ability to dispassionately discover previously undetected relationships and correlations, test their hypotheses, and then elevate them to production status. "Supervisor duties are increasingly shifting toward monitoring worker accomplishments through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation," explained Ms. Karamouzis.