Market research firm Gartner yesterday published its 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, and the study revealed that generative AI (genAI) has passed the “peak of inflated expectations” and is now sliding down into the “trough of disillusionment.”
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AI-assisted code generation tools are increasingly prevalent in software engineering, and somewhat unexpectedly have become low-hanging fruit for most organizations experimenting with genAI. Adoption rates are skyrocketing. That’s because even if they only suggest a baseline of code for a new application, automation tools can eliminate hours that otherwise would have been devoted to manual code creation and updating.
Hitting the peak of inflated expectations is prompt engineering, according to Gartner. While most large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are pre-filled with massive amounts of information, “prompt engineering,” a way of training the algorithm, allows genAI to be tailored for specific industry or even organizational use.
Source: Gartner
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Gartner’s trough of disillusionment describes a time when interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver on the initial hype of a technology. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investment continues only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters, according to Gartner.
“Generative AI (GenAI) is over the Peak of Inflated Expectations as business focus continues to shift from excitement around foundation models to use cases that drive ROI,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “This is accelerating autonomous AI. While the current generation of AI models lack agency, AI research labs are rapidly releasing agents which can dynamically interact with their environment to achieve goals, although this development will be a gradual process.
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Four Themes of Emerging Technology Trends
Autonomous AI: AI’s fast evolution is producing autonomous AI systems that can operate with minimal human oversight, improve themselves and become effective at decision-making in complex environments. These advanced AI systems that can perform any task a human can perform are beginning to move slowly from science fiction to reality. These technologies include multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning.
Boost Developer Productivity:Developer productivity is about more than writing code quickly. It’s influenced by developers’ effective communication and collaboration, and their feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment (being in the “flow state”).
“Technology is revolutionizing the way developers design and deliver software, making them more productive than ever,” said Chandrasekaran. “It’s ensuring they deliver higher-quality products quickly while maximizing gains by improving developer satisfaction, collaboration, and flow.”
Emerging technologies enabling developer productivity include AI-augmented software engineering, cloud-native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering and WebAssembly.
Empower With Total Experience: Total experience is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining customer experience, employee experience, multiexperience and user experience practices. It uses technology to address critical interactions, empowering both customers and employees, with the goal of driving greater confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Technologies to assess include digital twin of a customer, spatial computing, superapps and 6G.
Deliver Human-Centric Security and Privacy: Organizations will become more resilient by using security and privacy techniques that create a culture of mutual trust and awareness of shared risks between teams.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
