7 Disruptions Through 2029 You Might Not See Coming

thank you for joining me I'm darl plumber here to talk to you about the seven disruptions you might not see coming for 2024 through 2029 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 now 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 know 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 go click click click and and so forth you're going to use streaming and it's going to here 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 opes of the Gartner Futures lab now You' probably seen if you haven't

seen the Futures showcase down on the the show floor you got to go Marty resnic did an amazing job and it's a really fun thing to look at 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 combinatorial it's a combinatorial 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 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 because 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 Estel brov and we'll see her Avatar here 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 per 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 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 wanted 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 anybody no nobody wants to answer that question I'll answer it 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 7 + 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 the seven are on the left on that curve on the right we're seeing historical disruptions to

give you an idea what the current disruptions might be like over time 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 you go to 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 promised 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 outn number 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 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 the general area delivering pesticides all these things are real world examples of drones and they going to be more and more of them that come along I give you an example David fer longer 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 bares uh 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 Leon or Lon around 2 and a half 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 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 so we saw the Bee Movie you know what happens that they're not pollinating plants but now we have drones tiny little be 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 Outback 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 got interesting 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-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 prod 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 is extending markets because we're seeing those Chick-fil-A drones pull up next to us by 2029 there'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 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 and then keeps going on this was something that people hadn't thought of and they said unintended 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 autonomous agents I'm sorry the idea of Guardian agents apologies this is a term that we came up with earlier this year 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 mult agent systems and

agent orchestration you find Guardian agents company called explain spelled a iix p 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 well 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 skibby toilet way too much so the idea of a gardening 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 EXT in 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 you somebody asked me a smart alec asked me well wait a minute if the drones are if the the uh 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 guard rails to Guardian agents that's going to give you

a certain amount of success so develop these products and focus on low hanging 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 every guy in here wants to be Brad Pit 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 because they wanted to pick someone else Nathan Filan or someone like that they'll be able to do it now and personalized Cinema means we just disrupt a whole bunch of stuff because

when you go to personalized Cinema you start thinking first am I really want 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 act the um you know the the actors you create a whole line of content that somebody should get royalties for when they actually build these system you guys remember the Hollywood strike that went on earlier in the year 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 when you would have written and the writer 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 what were actually better than their songs and they said if those are hit I want my cut so they weren't you know negotiating to stop these things they were negotia 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 in 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 cuz nobody else wants to see you in that movie instead of bad 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 creep me out it was big scoops of chocolate chip ice cream in a bowl and I'm like oh chocolate chip I look 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've 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 got to do it for yourself so Talent is going to be changed because different Talent can be inserted in different situations