Gartner 2021 Top Strategic Technology Trends: AI Engineering, Distributed Cloud, Privacy Computing, and More

Gartner announced the top strategic technology trends enterprises should explore in 2021, presented at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas.

Brian Burke, Gartner research VP, emphasized the unprecedented demand for operational resilience across enterprise functions, requiring organizations to be dynamic and adaptable.

He identified three focus areas for 2021: people‑centricity, regional independence, and resilience, which together address societal and individual needs for optimal delivery.

Behavior Internet (IoB)

The emergence of the Internet of Behaviors (IoB) captures "digital dust" from daily life, combining technologies like facial recognition, location tracking, and big data with behavioral events such as purchases or device usage.

Organizations use IoB data to influence behavior, e.g., monitoring mask compliance via computer vision or detecting fevers with thermal imaging during the pandemic.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2025, over half of the world’s population will be enrolled in at least one IoB program, raising significant ethical and societal debates.

Total Experience (TX)

Building on the previous year’s multi‑experience trend, Gartner introduced the Total Experience (TX) strategy, linking multi‑experience with customer, employee, and user experience principles.

COVID‑19 accelerated the need for TX as interactions became more mobile, virtual, and distributed; TX aims to improve multiple experience components to drive transformative business outcomes.

Privacy‑Enhanced Computing

With mature data‑protection regulations, CIOs face heightened privacy and compliance risks; privacy‑enhanced computing protects data in use while maintaining confidentiality.

Gartner expects that by 2025, half of large organizations will adopt privacy‑enhanced computing for untrusted environments and multi‑party data analytics, prompting evaluation of high‑sensitivity data use cases.

Distributed Cloud

Distributed cloud spreads public‑cloud services across multiple physical locations while the provider retains operation, governance, and development responsibilities, meeting low‑latency, cost, and data‑residency needs.

By 2025, most cloud platforms will offer on‑demand distributed cloud services, positioning it as a future cornerstone of cloud computing.

Anywhere Operation

Anywhere operation is an IT model designed to support customers and employees across locations and manage distributed infrastructure, delivering value in collaboration, secure remote access, cloud/edge, digital experience measurement, and automation.

Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2023, 40% of enterprises will adopt anywhere operation to provide optimized hybrid virtual‑physical experiences.

Security Mesh

Security mesh enables secure access to any digital asset regardless of location, decoupling policy enforcement from decision‑making via a cloud‑delivered model, with identity as the security perimeter.

By 2025, security mesh is expected to handle over half of digital access‑control requests, addressing the expanded attack surface of distributed assets.

Intelligent Composable Business

Static business processes proved fragile during the pandemic; intelligent composable business redesigns decision‑making by leveraging richer data, AI‑enhanced insights, and flexible execution to enable new models and autonomous operations.

AI Engineering

Only 53% of AI projects move from prototype to production; AI engineering focuses on governance and lifecycle management across DataOps, ModelOps, and DevOps to improve performance, scalability, explainability, and reliability.

Hyper‑Automation

Business‑driven hyper‑automation rigorously identifies, reviews, and automates approved business and IT processes, accelerating digital‑first initiatives; over 70% of organizations now run dozens of hyper‑automation programs.

The 2021 trends highlight technologies poised to cause major disruption and opportunity over the next 5‑10 years; further details are available in Gartner’s “2021 Top Strategic Technology Trends” report and e‑book.