Main Technology Trends for Your Company in 2023

After almost three years of the 2020 events, the economy is picking up again. People are returning to normal, but does today’s consumer have the same profile as the pre-pandemic consumer? This unexpected event, the arrival of Covid, generated an accelerated wave of digital transformations. With the consumer off the streets, businesses had to move to digital. What changes now with the release of restrictive measures? And macroeconomic and geopolitical issues, how are they affecting consumer behavior?

We have consolidated some of the main technology trends for 2023 according to research conducted by Gartner, a leader and reference in the development of market studies related to the technology market. To see the original study, click here.

According to the research house, there are 3 main technology challenges for generating business results in 2023:

Optimize IT systems for greater reliability, improving the decision-making of technology leaders, guided by secure data and maintaining the integrity of the value of systems in production. Considering these challenges, we have as the 3 main trends: Digital immune system (focus on Quality Assurance), Applied observability (focus on data and AI), AI TRiSM ÔÇô AI Trust, Risk & Security Management (focus on security and risk management).

Accelerate offerings in the verticals served, increasing the pace of delivering digital products with quality and enabling connectivity everywhere, even those with low internet coverage. Considering these challenges, we have as the 3 main trends: Industry-suited cloud platforms (focus on infrastructure), Platform engineering (focus on developer experience), Wireless value generation (focus on APIs, integration and connectivity between platforms).

Enable the evolution and change of business models, reinventing roles and engagement with collaborators, prospects and customers, accelerating the experimentation of innovative strategies to explore new virtual markets. Considering these challenges, we have as the 3 main trends: Superapps (focus on composability and UX Design), Adaptive AI (focus on data and automation), Metaverse (focus on Web3 solutions).

Below we break down each of these trends, presenting at the end of each one what your company needs to do to avoid technological obsolescence.

1. Digital immune system (focus on Quality Assurance)

According to Gartner, by 2025, companies that invest in building digital immunity will considerably increase customer satisfaction, reducing customer downtime by 80%.

Conceptually, a digital immune system (DIS) combines various observability practices and technologies, automated testing with artificial intelligence (AI), chaos engineering, self-healing, reliability engineering, and software supply chain security to increase the resilience of digital products, services, and solutions.

A DIS provides a model to prepare your organization to minimize potential risks, and uses failures and errors as learning opportunities. The goal of DIS is resilience and availability, which results in a better customer experience when using the platform.

Therefore, a DIS can be used as a reference framework to invest in a set of practices to improve the quality and resilience of business-critical systems. The creation and evolution of DIS leads to more resilient business outcomes and creates value for business and IT stakeholders. As such, it enables your organization to play an essential role in connecting software development to business outcomes, ensuring quality at all stages of development.

What can my company do to have greater digital immunity in systems? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Form teams focused on creating and executing a DIS strategy. Start by evaluating which business resources have the highest priority or will benefit most from DIS investments.
• Create “practice communities” dedicated to sharing lessons learned, guiding principles, reusable assets, standards to follow, tools, and any insights based on artificial intelligence and quality assurance. Make sure teams are led by professionals with both technical and business vision so that all relevant aspects of your market are represented.
• Incentivize and reward resilience improvements throughout the organization, especially collaboration on DIS opportunities, making all leaders of resilience-related initiatives equally responsible for improving customer experiences and achieving business results.

2. Applied observability (focus on data and AI)

According to Gartner, by 2026, 70% of companies that successfully apply observability will achieve a shorter latency for decision-making, enabling the generation of competitive advantage for businesses and IT processes.

Applied observability is the applied use of observable data in a highly orchestrated approach integrated with all business functions,

infrastructure and operations teams and tools to enable the shortest latency from action to reaction and proactive planning of business decisions.

Observable data is cataloged, designed, and layered with semantic understanding for business context, resulting in active and passive metadata. The architected use of this metadata leads to better, faster, more consistent, and effective business and IT decisions.

Now, how does applied observability optimize operations? Applied observability enables companies to make faster and more accurate future decisions. By applying it systematically, your company can reduce response latency and optimize business operations in real time.

What can my company do to have better applied observability? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Treat your observable data as your most valuable monetizable asset. Focus on identifying business resources and active and passive metadata use cases to gain competitive advantage. This will form the initial base for strategically orchestrating multiple simultaneous observability initiatives.
• Drive proactive decision-making with the shortest possible latency, refocusing the organization from monitoring and reacting to applying observability.
• Pave the way for organizational adoption of applied observability. Do this by focusing on the spectrum of business layers, tooling, and infrastructure.

3. AI Trust, Risk & Security Management (AI TRiSM)

According to Gartner, by 2026, organizations that operationalize AI transparency and trust and security management will see their AI models achieve a 50% improvement in results in terms of user adoption.

Artificial intelligence requires new forms of trust, risk, and security management that conventional controls do not offer. New AI resources ensure model reliability, security, and privacy. This includes solutions, techniques, and processes for model interpretability and explainability, AI privacy, model operations, and resistance to adversarial attacks.

What can my company do to be assertive with AI usage? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Set up an organizational task force or dedicated unit to manage your AI TRiSM efforts.
• Implement AI privacy, security, and collective risk management to achieve better AI business outcomes, rather than just for compliance reasons.
• Work with your entire organization to efficiently manage the best sets of tools as part of a comprehensive AI TRiSM program.
• Ensure your AI models are explainable or interpretable using open-source tools or vendor solutions that add value.
• Implement solutions that protect data used by AI models and prepare to use different data protection methods for different use cases and their components.
• Incorporate risk management into model operations using solutions that ensure model and data integrity and constantly validate they are operating reliably.

4. Industry-suited cloud platforms (focus on infrastructure)

According to Gartner, by 2027, more than 50% of companies will use cloud solutions to accelerate their business initiatives.

Cloud solutions suited to a specific sector create value for companies by incorporating cloud services, traditionally acquired separately, into pre-integrated solutions that guarantee customization for demands related to that specific sector.

In other words, cloud platforms suited to a specific sector allow a shift from generic solutions to platforms designed to meet the specifics of that market segment.

Such solutions combine software, platforms, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with customized and sector-specific functionalities that can more easily adapt to the reality of each market segment. Companies can use the business resources of sector cloud platforms as building blocks to compose exclusive and differentiated digital initiatives. This composability provides agility, innovation, and reduction of time to market, for example.

What can my company do to have a cloud solution suited to my sector? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Direct sector cloud platforms to complement the existing portfolio (like a lego) with new resources that add significant value to your business, rather than large-scale replacements of largely existing functionalities with more updated technology.
• Create understanding and support across the company for the sector’s cloud journey involving business technologists and fusion teams. Create these teams if they don’t already exist.
• Formulate rules for when to deploy sector cloud platform resources as a productive platform for optimization and modernization, improving existing processes and when to actively recompose them for more differentiated transformation and innovation initiatives.

5. Platform engineering (focus on developer experience)

According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering companies will establish teams as internal providers of services, components, and tools for delivering digital solutions.

To help developers, data scientists, and end users reduce friction for their valuable time, forward-thinking companies have begun building operational platforms that sit between users and the support services they trust (backoffice). Basically, platform engineering optimizes the developer experience and accelerates digital delivery to the user.

Platforms provide a curated set of tools, resources, and processes packaged to facilitate consumption by end users. The goal is a frictionless self-service experience that offers the right resources to allow users to go through the purchase journey, for example, with minimal possible overload, increasing end-user productivity and reducing their cognitive load. The platform must include everything the user team needs, presented in the way that best fits their current workflow.

What can my company do to start working with platform engineering? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Start with internal developer portals (IDPs). Direct your initial platform building efforts to IDPs, as these are the most mature and well-understood types of platforms.
• Incorporate security into platforms. Platforms must incorporate security into user workflows. Security teams need to incorporate controls into the production workflow as early as possible. Platform engineers must incorporate comprehensive and automated security and compliance checks as part of their test suites.
• Don’t wait to buy a ready-to-use platform. Although some vendors may claim otherwise, it is unlikely that any currently available tool will provide the full range of functionality you need. A substantial amount of time and effort will be required to customize a platform according to your needs.

6. Wireless value generation (focus on APIs, integration and connectivity)

According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of corporate wireless access points will use network services that offer additional resources beyond communication. The integration of various wireless technologies, such as IoT and 5G, for example, will provide a more economical, reliable, and scalable technical base that reduces company expenses.

This trend evidences the future of greater wireless usage, more wireless protocols, and a wider range of wireless resources being used to support digital businesses.

Wireless value generation encompasses everything from traditional end-user computing, to edge device support, to digital identification solutions. All of them will need connectivity to operate and will require a spectrum of wireless solutions to meet all environments. Networks will go far beyond pure connectivity to become a direct source of commercial value. Wireless technology is moving from being a communication technology to becoming a broader digital innovation platform.

What can my company do to adapt to the wireless value generation trend? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Design an intelligent infrastructure strategy, starting with selecting the right technologies and vendors that understand solutions that can accommodate, protect, and manage five or more diverse future wireless systems.
• Educate business stakeholders about new potential use cases for wireless technology, such as location and detection. Collaborate with them to identify innovation opportunities to drive new products and services.
• Promote the standardization of connectivity and security elements that, as interoperable components, create a solid, secure, and resilient foundation for wireless devices and applications.

7. Superapps (focus on composability and UX Design)

According to Gartner, by 2027, more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps.

A superapp is an application that provides end users (customers, partners, or employees, for example) with a set of resources, plus access to independently created mini-apps. A superapp is a platform that offers consistent and personalized experiences to users.

In other words, users can discover and activate their own set of applications, providing a highly personalized and contextualized digital experience within a single app.

A superapp is more than an application or portal that aggregates services, resources, and functions in a single user interface. A superapp represents the final manifestation of a composable application and architecture.

What can my company do to have a superapp? (besides talking to Zappts)

• The company can increase the effectiveness of the superapp delivery model by designing user-centered products, processes, and services.
• Identify which are the main and high-engagement resources in your superapps that will drive a critical mass of end users.
• To attract and support development partners, ensure a mutually beneficial business model and dedicated resources for organizational enablement and success.
• Optimize your developer experience and provide convenient development tools so partners can create, test, register, and submit mini-apps for potential monetization.
• Define security and data protection requirements for mini-apps by establishing ecosystem governance with shared platform resources.

8. Adaptive AI (focus on data and automation)

According to Gartner, by 2026, companies that adopt AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.

The value of artificial intelligence lies in the ability to quickly develop, implement, adapt, and maintain AI across different company environments. Given the complexity of engineering and the demand for a faster “time to market,” it is essential to develop less rigid AI engineering pipelines or build AI models that can self-adapt in production.

In other words, adaptive AI systems allow model behavior change after deployment, learning behavioral patterns from previous human and machine experiences and in execution environments to adapt more quickly to changes in real-world circumstances.

AI engineering provides the fundamental components of implementation, operationalization, and change management at the process level that enable adaptive AI systems.

What can my company do to use adaptive AI? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Create the foundations of adaptive AI systems by complementing current AI implementations with continuous intelligence design patterns and event flow resources, eventually migrating to agent-based methods, giving more autonomy to system components.
• Facilitate AI adoption by your users and contribute to the management of adaptive AI systems by incorporating explicit and measurable business indicators through operationalized systems and incorporating trust into the decision framework.
• Maximize the commercial value of ongoing AI initiatives by establishing AI engineering practices that simplify data, models, and implementation pipelines to standardize AI delivery processes.

9. Metaverse (focus on Web3 solutions)

According to Gartner, by 2027, more than 40% of large companies worldwide will be using a Web3 solution in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.

The metaverse is a combinatorial innovation composed of various themes and technological trends. Individually, these trends are designed to provide new opportunities and challenges for organizations across a broad spectrum of sectors and use cases.

Organizations are developing ways to provide better engagement, collaboration, and connection for their employees through virtual workspaces and the use of internal metaverse experiences called intraverses.

Furthermore, metaverse technologies allow people to replicate or enhance their physical activities. This can happen by transporting or extending physical activities to a virtual world or transforming the physical world. Think of metaverses as combinatorial innovation rather than a single technology. The implications of emerging metaverse technologies vary across sectors.

What can my company do to enter the metaverse? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Explore opportunities where metaverse technologies can optimize digital businesses or create new products and services.
• Create products and solutions in the metaverse through an innovation pipeline.
• Identify metaverse-inspired opportunities by evaluating current high-value use cases.
• Develop technology strategies that leverage integrated infrastructure and participants.
• Invest in specific emerging metaverses with caution, as it is still too early to determine which investments will be viable in the long term.
• Protect your reputation by proactively establishing a governance, security, and data privacy policy to protect customer and employee data.

10. Sustainable Technology (focus on continuity)

According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics linked to technological sustainability.

Sustainable technologies are a solution framework that increases the energy and material efficiency of IT services (enables business sustainability through technologies such as traceability, analytics, renewable energy, and others) and helps customers become more sustainable through applications, software, markets, and much more. Investments in sustainable technology also have the potential to create greater operational resilience and financial performance while providing new growth paths.

Sustainable technology is a framework of digital solutions that can be used to enable ESG outcomes:

• Environmental technologies: Prevent, mitigate, and adapt to risks in the natural world.
• Social technologies: Improve human rights, well-being, and prosperity indicators.
• Governance technologies: Strengthen business conduct and empowerment.

What can my company do to have technological sustainability? (besides talking to Zappts)

• Increase the energy and material efficiency of IT infrastructure and workplace services (“sustainable IT”).
• Prioritize technology investments based on the sustainability issues most relevant to your business strategy. Examples may include:

Cloud services to increase shared resource utilization rates and reduce environmental impacts.

Corporate greenhouse gas emissions management software to facilitate collection, analysis, and reporting of past, present, and future emissions data.

Supplier sustainability applications to track third-party ESG performance.

Blockchain use in the supply chain to protect, verify, and track transactions, for example, to ensure ethical sourcing.

Have any questions, or want to know more?

Zappts can help your company build digital products and services that guarantee business results as early as 2023. Since 2014, Zappts has been delivering business results through technology, delivering high-relevance cases using agile processes, best practices in software development and quality, and a unique ability to understand and solve the day-to-day pains of technology development projects.

We provide solutions for all phases of digital solution development, from discovery processes to solution support. With defined processes and agile management, our deliveries are always based on expectation alignment, quality, and technical robustness.

Get in touch by clicking here, and learn more about Zappts.