Bill Ray, Gartner’s VP Analyst and Chief of Research, shared this year’s top 12 emerging technology and trends disruptors at Gartner Special Event on May 21 at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 2.

The 12 world-changing trends discussed were poly functional robots, energy efficient compute, earth intelligence, sensor fusion, algorithm aligned silicon, preemptive security, synthetic data, domain language models, generative AI (GenAI) coding, disinformation, intelligent simulation and digital ethics.

“We can do better than humanoids,” Ray said, it was up to the end user, but not the builder, to decide how to use a poly functional robot, and that GenAI could make deploying a robot much easier, “the market opportunity is massive.”

However, “we are going to need some automation,” he said, “because we are running out of power.”

GenAI has made power shortage much worse, and by 2026, it would delay over 30 percent of all data center expansions, he warned.

Demand for data analysis also came from space, he said, when emphasizing the significance of earth intelligence – the possibility of generating more than US$3.8 trillion in value by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum.

Sense of fusion would be another source of information, he said, and that synthetic sensors would become the preferred means to capturing real-time data.

Sensing the invisible had created new business models and new ways of looking at data, he said.

The quantity of data was increasing, but the existing architectures would not be able to support it, he said.

By 2030, algorithm aligned chip architectures would double their share to 60 percent of data center AI accelerator chip market, he said.

Power consumption and the cost of AI infrastructures would be reduced, he said.

However, with more data centers and more AI, security would be a concern, he said.

Cybersecurity had shifted from “detect and respond” to “pre-emptive,” he said, projecting the latter, with the help of GenAI, to account for 50 percent of IT security spending.

The data that required protection itself was also changing, he said.

Synthetic data would be the future of analysis, he said, adding that it would surpass real data as the foundation for business decision making by 2030.

Generated by AI through language models, synthetic data was not theoretical but a new industry in the making where brand trust became the differentiator, he said.

However, the future of AI would not be large language models but domain-specific language models, he said, with the latter being used by 90 percent of GenAI-enabled solutions by 2030.

GenAI would enable dynamic and composable solutions – multimodal, low-code or even no-code – that would be served by refactored traditional software, he said.

In addition, Ray warned that disinformation would pose as a big business threat as information security breaches.

As the world became more complexed, one of the tools to address complexity was intelligent simulation, he said.

This year, the first pharmaceutical drugs designed entirely in simulation would become available after human trials, with hundreds more in the pipeline, he said.

When almost everything could be simulated, it raised a significant question: digital ethics, he said.

Ethical debt management would be a key differentiator, he said.

Ray concluded his speech by emphasizing that the 12 trends would bring fundamental changes to everyone that should not be ignored.