welcome to Gartner Thinkcast i'm Karen Stokes Lockheart today we'll be covering Gartner's seven disruptions through 2029 you might not see coming every year distinguished VP analyst Daryl Plamer unveils his updated list of disruptions at Gartner IT Symposium Expo we'll hear him walk through all seven from AI avatars and water scarcity to personalized movie experiences while offering advice for CIOS and tech leaders to stay ahead of the curve now here's Darl thank you for joining me i'm Daryl Plamer here to talk to you about the seven disruptions you might not see coming now if you've seen this presentation before you know that I'm trying to talk about disruptions that you might have heard about but you probably don't know either how close they are to happen or how significant they might be disruptions in Gartner are a specific kind of thing we don't just use the word disruption to say something has changed we use the word disruption to indicate that there has been a fundamental shift in in some system of behavior technology governance whatever and and that disruption doesn't go back we're not talking about a fad that usually comes fast spikes high and then disappears right i just um I asked one one of my kids asked me um if they could buy some Pokemons and I said "Let me download Pokemon Go." Do you remember Pokémon Go is anybody still playing Pokémon Go i think the servers are down or something oh no it's working i got to try it again then but you know it's like Cabbage Patch Kids you know they came and went these fads well disruptions come and they stay until something disrupts them again okay so they're not short-term things they're they're fundamental changes you know we're not going back to broadcast television with three channels you know click click click and and so forth you're going to use streaming and it's going to be here to stay so that's the kind of disruption we're talking about now this presentation is a part of our research set um and under the the opaces of the Gartner Futures Lab but the futures lab is is looking at future technologies now we have multiple things in the futures lab we have trends we have forces we have disruptions we have predictions we have all this stuff going on um but they are related to one another uh in that they're all talking about the future they're all talking about what practical benefit that future will bring today and right now disruption we're seeing as cominatorial it's a cominatorial effect now you've heard this word probably before but the idea is that no one disruption happens and then it's gone now the the example I've been using for years is that disruption happens in this way picture a quiet lake somewhere and a giant boulder falls off a mountain and hits the lake there's a big splash that we call a disruption catalyst the splash goes away quickly however chat GPT was one of those by the way and the thing is that the ripples that radiate out from the splash zone is what we're really interested in how does it change things if it's a big enough splash the ripples could overturn a boat or swamp a dock or change the shoreline so that's what we care about and we measure it based on that and when you have two stones hit the lake the ripples begin to interfere with one another they bounce off one another and create complex patterns that's what we're seeing we're seeing climate change we're seeing AI we're seeing power generation security exponential technologies that work together all colliding with one another and they have these effects that we that are harder to track because they're combinatorial so our jobs just got a lot harder so that's what disruptions are now there's another thing that we have to talk about which is AI and I I mentioned in the top predicts presentation that I have an AI avatar gartner built one of me and uh it's pretty fun but I thought it would be nice to give you guys a sense of what that actually looks like since I can't show you mine um or rather I won't show you mine i'll show you this one um which will give you an idea of what it can do we're talking about the CEO of Viola and her name is um Bradenov and we'll see her avatar here french espanol and Arabic this is a real person and her mannerisms were recorded her voice was recorded and the AI creates the language translation it gives you a realistic feel of talking to a real person you can go talk to Albert Einstein you can go talk to Shakespeare online today because this technology is coming and we'll all have to deal with it i wanted to give you a sense of that because it's important not to ignore some of these things that will sneak in and sort of disrupt your workplace as well as disrupt your p personal lives you know I you know imagine that you had an avatar that you could send off to do something that you can't or don't want to do right that the parent teachers meeting at the school i don't ever want to go one day i'm sending my avatar in my place you know but the idea of work of course is that your business is going to want to use that avatar to its advantage and will use it where you can't be or where they would rather not have you be you know and I said in the top predicts presentation we have to ask the question do we get paid for that right if you don't get paid for it you probably shouldn't let them record that avatar so AI is at the heart of disruption going forward people ask me "What comes after AI?" And my answer is more AI we're going to have to figure out how to get it right we're going to have to figure out how to make it stop having errors we're going to have to figure out how we should use it what we should want it to do and then use it safely and productively so we're going to be figuring out this AI thing for a while anybody here want to say how they know when artificial general intelligence has arrived it's when you can't tell the difference if you can't tell the difference it doesn't matter whether it's really intelligent whether it really reasons or whether it's a real person because you can't tell the difference and so everything is on a course toward that notion that AI is getting better and better so we can't tell the difference but it's not the only disruption that's happening it impacts everything here we have seven plus one the one being AI avatars disruptions on our scale our scale is designed around the idea that it can allow you to compare disruptions that we go that we're going to look at moving up the scale means it's more impactful more secondary effects more ripples radiating out and changing the shoreline and that is our mechanism for looking at how these things happen if you're enhancing markets at the bottom you're at the lowest level of disruption that's like adding catalytic converters to a car when you're talking about extending markets it's about adding hybrid electric vehicles on the street when you transform markets it gives you a full EV fleets when you reinvent markets you go from cars driving on the road to flying cars and when you go to revolutionize it means it's big enough to affect the entire world that's how we're talking about these things and we'll use that to rate these disruptions as we go i'm still waiting for my flying car you know I was plumbers flying cars underwater bubble cities and floating cities and I got social media i'm a little bit angry about that but the reality is the disruptions keep coming at us so in 2029 these things will move up the chart it's very hard to get to the top of these chart but these are fairly significant should they play out the way that they have been going so far all right let's jump into the real ones drones plus intelligence will outnumber people this is probably not surprising to you the notion that drones are going to be out there is something we've been dealing with a long time and but what mostly what we think of is we think of those fun drones you see at the park somebody's buzzing over your head the thing is that drones are being you put to real uses spraying crops in a field swarms of them measuring the temperature across a general area delivering pesticides all these things are realworld examples of drones and there going to be more and more of them that come along i give you an example david Furlonger one of the guys who helped build this presentation was talking about the fact he lives in British Columbia and like Australia they have significant issues with forest fires because forest fires happen all around the world california Australia BC and there were 4,677 buyers fires burning over 4 million hectares of land in BC the cost in 2023 was 1 billion for only half that number now enter drones the idea is that in a town called Leighton or Linton around 2 and a half um thousand people were impacted let's say by the fires and this idea was that drones could be brought in to help fight the fires to help locate people saw a wonderful video of a lost child found by a drone in the middle of a dr jungle so life-saving technology is coming from these drones so we have a a a disruption that says that drones are a big part of the plan for safety emergency response delivery and everything that's going on technological insects with purpose is the way I like to think of them we even have drones that can mimic bees do you remember the bees were dying off i think they still are but what's going to pollinate the plants we saw the bee moving you know what happens if they're not pollinating plants but now we have drones tiny little bee drones that can fly around with these little velcro strips hanging from them collect pollen and take them to other plants you know if you're out back and you feel a little sting and you go like that and you open your hand and you got a drone instead of a bee you know what I'm talking about the idea is that these drones are going to be used for good things with purpose but they're also being used in multiple ways so in agriculture I talked about light cargo deliveries the idea of a you know light cargo delivery was proposed a long time ago the Amazon drone that drops your package off you know we have autonomous vehicles that well most of us still don't drive in them but they're they're out there autonomous ships which are safer because they're in a big ocean and warfare where we're seeing the most development happening around drones interesting little on a personal note I'm I live in Atlanta Georgia chick-fil-a is in Atlanta Georgia now I'm hungry but the idea was that you know Chick-fil-A is always reinventing how they deliver food to people go through the drive-thru or pull up and park and they'll bring your food out i'm sitting at a red light and a Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick Chick-fil-A drone pulls up next to me no person just a box with wheels and a lot of Chick-fil-A sandwiches okay I did not steal them i did think about it but the reality is that you're going to see these things appear around you and you're not expecting it and these drones are now out there being able to do things that you won't even think about as being valuable but they wind up becoming valuable so we're going to see these drones coming along in the warfare camp we have to realize that we're going to see more of that because it makes militaries more efficient the more efficient ways to produ to uh conduct a war are what we want and if we can do it without putting more human lives in danger that would be a good thing too so what gets disrupted here this is how we use the scale in 2024 it's extending markets because we're seeing those Chick-fil-A drones pull up next to us by 2029 it'll be reinventing home markets that are now fully drone delivered and fully drone done you won't have to send out agents into the field to climb on your roof for that roof damage you won't have to send out agents to check on crops and pesticides the drones will do it for you so we're talking about live cargo delivery we're talking about warehouse deliveries we're talking about troop deployments all of these things are disrupted so what do we have to do well we're in a world where we have to start thinking about the unintended consequences when we first started talking about drone deliveries everybody said no do you know why the main reason was because people said "What happens if that package drone flies past my second floor bathroom window turns and takes a picture then keeps going on." This was something that people hadn't thought of and they said "Unedended consequence we have to be ready for those things." And actually those drones will have agency increasingly they will be responsible they will be a autonomous from human beings and that scares people so we'll actually see how that progresses but it's closer than you might think now our second disruption here is guardian agents you've heard about it in multiple presentations because it could be very critical having technology that actually oversees what AI is doing is critical because humans cannot do it themselves human in the loop is an equation that will collapse on itself because human beings are not numerous enough to track all the AI that's going to be out there and human beings are not reliable enough to do it right so you have to have agents that are going to come in here and do it for you at the intersection of security observability filtering and monitoring multi- aent systems and agent orchestration you find Guardian agents company called Explain spelled A IIX PL L A I N is delivering guardian agents now they're a startup but they are actually delivering a lot of different kinds of agents mentor agents broker agents and guardian agents to help protect people and to make sure the quality of their AI results are assured now people say well you know hey we're in a business we don't deal with that kind of stuff you know if you're a bank you might want to have guardian agents that help your customers get the best deals get the best loans help them understand how to manage their accounts i have children who I would like to have a guardian agent checking where they're where they're at during the day how fast they're driving on the street and if they're watching YouTube and Skippy toilet way too much so the idea of a guardian agent can be applied anywhere and we will do that to actually make them more secure make them more accurate make them less dangerous over time so here's where we are on guardian agents extending markets in 2024 we'll be transforming markets in 2029 because human in the loop will be a thing of the past as a primary strategy of course there'll be humans in the loop for a long time but as a primary strategy you'll be saying AI must combat AI ai must ensure the safety of AI and somebody asked me a smart alec asked me "Well wait a minute if the drones are if the the uh the agents are watching the other agents who watches the agents that watch the agents?" I I said "Get out just leave go." The reality is that the problem space shrinks with each layer so if you got a problem space you got agents watching them the problems that they deal with are less the next level they're less and less you won't have an infinite regress you'll probably only have to go one or two layers deep so when we do this we can do self-healing processes we can do autonomous systems we can start seeing the evolution of systems to do what they need to do based on their own terms so what do you need to do you have to actually understand that agents are going to accelerate their proliferation you're going to wake up one day and they're going to be agents all around you and you don't know how they got there so you have to be starting to think right now about securing agents with technology so if you have a security observability monitoring filtering you know and masking practice start thinking about how you turn those things from just security mechanisms to guard rails from guard rails to guardian agents if you're a tech provider that should be your next speech from guardrails to guardian agents that's going to give you a certain amount of success so develop these products and focus on lowhanging fruit things that are not life critical but certainly need to be overseen here's one of the fun ones what if you could put yourself in a movie right so you know I I every guy in here wants to be Brad Pitt i know it i want to be Forest Whitaker cuz I look more like him if you saw that movie Ghost Dog you know what I'm talking about but the idea is that we're in a world now because of AI avatars we will be able to create personal cinema of ourselves we can say "I want to play that role i want to play in the movie and see myself." But more broadly I'd like to choose the actor that is in the movie not just me but another actor that I'd like to see doing it a lot of people when they saw Ben Affleck as Batman were complaining cuz they wanted to pick someone else Nathan Fillian or someone like that they'll be able to do it now and personalized cinema means we disrupt a whole bunch of stuff because when you go to personalized cinema you start thinking first am I really going to want to watch myself or certain actors in these roles because they may not come off as good as the original ones people in Hollywood are pretty good at picking the right people you know and if you pick the acts the um you know the the actors you create a whole line of content that somebody should get royalties for when they actually build the system or you guys remember the Hollywood strike that went on earlier in the year and late last year the writers were on strike and the actors joined them the reason they did it is because the studios were saying "We're going to use your name image and likeness to actually make a movie without you." And they said "You can't do that you have to pay me." The writers they said "We're going to use AI to write a movie that's just like one you would have written." And the writers said "That's not fair you're stealing my skill you're stealing my talents." We've already seen it with musicians you know The Weekend a lawsuit because AI had created songs that sounded exactly like them but were actually better than their songs and they said "If those are a hit I want my cut." So they weren't you know negotiating to stop these things is they were negotiating on how much money they can get from it so when we think about this it's going to change everything about music production and delivery it's going to change and 2029 is reinventing markets because production companies are going to make movies that are designed for you to insert new actors in or insert yourself in it they're going to change the royalty and licensing rules around it they're going to change the viewer engagement model because you probably won't go to a theater because nobody else wants to see you in that movie instead of bad print so you got to watch it at home so all of these things get disrupted and you have to start thinking about customization of content using digital and AI i saw this wonderful video the other day creeped me out it was big scoops of chocolate chip ice cream in a bowl and I'm like "Oh chocolate chip it looked good." Then the chocolate chip ice cream started moving and it moved and more and it turned into a bunch of puppies with black and white spots was the creepiest thing I ever seen but I started thinking how can I do that you know morphing content for your business is a great place to go you got to get on that now because you don't want to be watching other people do it to you you've got to do it for yourself so talent is going to be changed because different talent can be inserted in different situations and it's a very important thing to get right number four we only have seven seo 3.0 search engine optimization what we're talking about here is the idea that now optimizing a search algorithm is not the final frontier it is in fact personalizing everything influencers rule the world now we know this right anybody heard of uh Charlie Damelio well I guess my my 16-year-old daughter knows who she is you know but Charlie Ailio is a young girl who started dancing at age 15 on Tik Tok and she's worth over $150 million anybody want to go dance on some videos we got a camera back here the reality is that influencer doing that my little kids watch Mr beast and they're influencers that are there what if you could you know um influence by using algorithms to create personalized content of yourself post it to Tik Tok post it to YouTube what if you actually had those algorithms that would find the right advertisers that would pay when people come to your your content this is SEO 3.0 this is where we start talking about personalizing everything personalizing our medical outcomes personalizing our food choices in restaurants personalizing our choices in everything and some people will use those personalizations to hack the traditional algorithms to actually make an algorithm give them what they want give them more support for their own influence drive people to your content all by personalized SEO so the notion here is that as this thing goes it won't move as fast as some others but it'll be transforming markets because now traditional SEO is going to be challenged heavily marketing people will use these tactics of personalizing marketing to each of us you walk through an airport there's a billboard that's digital and as you look at it it changes and transform to be about you not just a general purpose video okay that's personalization and they're going to use that on you and influencers are going to use it to draw you to their content as well so decide if you want to attack or defend impersonalized content do you want to actually hack the algorithm or just use it to build more influence or power that's the easiest way to become rich right now do something on the internet that people will watch you do there's a trend that I don't understand is kids love watching videos of other kids playing video games now if you're a parent who says "I don't want my kids playing video games because they need to be outside playing with their kids and exercising." and you come in and your kid is not only watching a video but it's of another kid playing video i that's an infinite regress we got to stop so traditional SEO investments are going to go down number five the energy power play where are the power going to come from you've heard a lot about energy crisis right you've heard that we're using up so much of our power but what you haven't heard about is that the big consumers are going to have to generate the power artificial intelligence electric vehicles factory automation everything we're doing you know artificial general robotics is going to use more and more power so what do you do you go out and you create a micro grid and you generate power for yourself and share it with a community microsoft was recently quoted as being in a conversation about buying three Mile Islands remember three Mile Island it's pretty scary why do they want to buy a nuclear disaster site is because nuclear power is going to be used to power these data centers and they're going to generate power much more than they need one day we may find that if they do that and they're generating a lot of power and they're sharing it on a micro grid developers businesses may start building around that and three Mile Island might become the new Sag Harbor the idea of being able to use power generation as a tool to draw a community to you is right beyond the idea of modernized data centers with renewable power sources so we'll get that done i want to be the guy who builds a renewable power source and have developers build apartments and homes around it so that they get cheaper power and they don't have to worry about the coming energy crisis so sharing in a consortium of people you know is a good idea so where is it on the chart extending markets because we're now seeing different kinds of power generation sources self-generation is the buzzword of the day by 2029 our traditional shared grid will probably be begin to be a thing of the past because that grid is fragile it can break down and we don't want to be living in the darkness okay now you remember I said in the top predicts my my son uses um Alexa to answer math questions instead of doing the math himself right and people say "Well what if he doesn't learn how to do it himself what if the power goes out?" And I always say "What if the power goes out for us we're doomed because we can't live in a world without power anymore." If you don't believe me give your mobile phone to a friend for one week and see how fast you pull your hair out the reality anybody here who doesn't use a mobile anybody here still got a Blackberry man there's always one you know I used to love my Blackberry you'd have to pry it from my cold dead hands but one day I got an iPhone and I drove two hours to get to the ocean so I could throw the Blackberry in and say but now I got an iPhone stuck in my pocket all the time so it's kind of annoying number six software defined semiconductors we're increasingly using software to change the performance and behavior of hardware now we've gone through many eras of hardware design semiconductor design and as we go through those eras we get more and more efficient technology but software is the next level of efficiency software in a software defined architecture can be used to determine how the chips will run will they run hot will they run faster will they run slower it can also be used in chip design so we won't have to have so many designs we can have a base chip and software will modify the functionality of that design so we're in a world that where software is influencing everything unfortunately when software is brought into the picture threats surfaces expand so we can get in a situation where you get a chip from the factory and it's already got malware in it or it's already got some security breach in it that happened a long time ago so it's nothing new it's just the degree to which we use it means there is more opportunity to do that but in the meantime software design and softwaredefined semiconductors come together to allow us to build software and infrastructure designed to support AI much more effectively when should you use an accelerator when should you use a general purpose CPU when should you use a GPU all could be chosen by software in the design especially in a given server or a given series of racks within your liquid cooled data center so this idea of software defined is a big deal it's still at the low end of the chart because we still got a lot of issues to work out but as it goes up in 2029 to transforming markets we'll see semiconductor design begin to transform we'll see performance and energy also begin to reduce their burden because right now we got to have less energy hungry chips and we got to make it work for us without us having to do it on our own you have to start thinking about getting software engineers management and designers together in your data centers and talk about hardware designs and what you demand from the providers is going to change so over time you will optimize performance of these chipsets and you'll have a more aggressive road map as it goes on all right number seven water scarce scarcity did you know let me just throw a few numbers at you here according to the um you know when we look at uh the numbers Virginia in the US hosts the biggest concentration of data centers globally and Google has suggested that 15% of its freshwater uses come from areas with high water scarcity now think about that a second when you have a lot of data centers in one place and you have relatively low availability of fresh water you actually could be causing a problem of massive proportions and we're seeing that happen increasingly because all of our processes use a lot of water you want to dye a t-shirt it uses a whole bunch of water to get it done and you can't do anything with that water after it's done dump it outside that's it even in in uh strategies for data centers liquid cooling warm water cooling you know you have to cool the water down which uses power and then send it through and the processors heat the water up and it comes out room temperature and you can't do anything with it except water the lawn you know so you have to start thinking can we create water loops that allow us to use that water that comes out as effectively as we used it when we went in these kind of strategies happen so with liquid cooling for instance you get into a situation of using warm water to go in it heats it up to 50 degrees C and it comes out and you use it to heat an apartment building so you can use power in many different ways because if not we're going to get into a problem of compliance um you know u isolation of our resources and a lack of sustainability over time what we've seen is that AI can be used to make this better 20 by 2027 AI is going to help save 4.2 two to six billion cubic meters of water you know and and when we look at that that's a pretty big number and AI can do more on that because right now electrification compute power cooling and our consumption are all combinatorally creating a problem for us with water so we have to actually think about water and think about how we're using water and should we keep using the way we are as I said you know we have to prepare for a future of water scarcity you know dependencies on it reducing the risk associated with it um and over time we can partner with different organizations and institutions to figure out how water should be used so start doing water risk assessments start looking at circular technologies like the warm water cooling to actually use the water outside of the loop just as it's going into the loop so there we have it seven disruptions now if you want to talk to us about these more we can get into a conversation so you can understand how these things might affect you and what other disruptions are coming along that you might not have seen just yet in the meantime what I'd like you to do is go forward and look for disruptions look for how they will change what you do today and ask yourselves do I want to change or do I want to stay where I am until something changes me thank you very much for listening and enjoy the rest of the day thanks for listening to this latest episode of Thinkcast that was Gartner distinguished VPN analyst Daryl Plamer to learn more about the disruptions to watch out for follow the links in the show notes thinkast will be back wherever you listen to podcasts a week from today in the meantime please rate review subscribe and share with a colleague so neither of you will miss it thinkcast is a production of Gartner this podcast may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's permission it consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization which should not be construed as statements of fact content provided by other speakers is expressly the views of the speaker and or their organization while the information contained in this podcast has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy completeness or adequacy of such information although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues Gartner does not provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such