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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is here.
- It underscores machine customers, among other new technologies.
- AI will play a growing role in business operations, Gartner predicts.
AI will increasingly automate day-to-day decision-making for businesses in the coming years, thanks to AI and other emerging technologies, Gartner claims in a new report.
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The consulting firm’s annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report aims to provide a sober and practical picture of how buzzy new technologies will be leveraged by businesses in the near future. The latest report, published Wednesday, highlights — as you won’t be surprised to learn — AI agents as one of the burgeoning technologies that’s expected to reshape the business landscape over the next two to ten years. Gartner has previously predicted that half of all business decisions will be handled by agents by the end of 2027.
Agents aren’t perfect out of the box, however; Just last month, Gartner also reported that AI agents are among the most overhyped technologies in the space and offered suggestions for how to make the most of them.
There are a few other technologies that you might not expect to see on the list, or that you may not have even heard of. All of these are ushering in what Gartner describes in a press release as “the new autonomous business era.” Here are the technologies that made this year’s report.
1. Machine customers
At the top of the list is “machine customers” — not customers looking to buy a machine, but actually automated agents placing an order and making a purchase on behalf of an individual or organization. According to Gartner, there are currently around three billion such machines in use today, and that number is expected to rise to 8 billion by 2030.
2. AI agents
Again, it probably won’t come as much of a shock to you that AI agents were included in Gartner’s new report. The technology was likewise a central focus in recent reports from McKinsey and Forrester, both of which also assessed the business impacts of various emerging technologies.
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Gartner writes that AI agents “could transform many industries by automating work in areas like consumer services, industry, data analysis, content creation, and logistics.”
The report also notes, however, that adoption of this technology is being slowed by widespread concerns over agents’ ability to function without careful human oversight. Other recent data has shown that the vast majority of IT professionals are also worried about the data security risks posed by agents — though that doesn’t seem to be hindering their industry’s adoption of the technology.
3. Decision intelligence
You can think of this as similar to human decision-making supplemented with AI models whose job is to forecast economic and commercial trends. It’s a new kind of data science that seeks to iteratively improve upon itself, creating a positive feedback loop of efficiency for businesses.
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“By digitizing and modeling decisions as assets, [decision intelligence] bridges the insight-to-action gap to continuously improve decision quality, actions, and outcomes,” Gartner writes in the press release.
4. Programmable money
This isn’t crypto. Programmable money, according to Gartner, “is any form of digital money that can be programmed using software that determines its operation based on algorithmic criteria.”
That’s a mouthful, so let’s break it down a bit. Whereas traditional forms of currency (cash, checks, and credit) require an intermediary like a bank to ensure that all parties play by the rules, programmable money can operate according to specifications that are determined by the parties themselves. A business might, for example, program a transaction to automatically take place once conditions stipulated by a blockchain-based smart contract have been met. Or, in a more futuristic twist, a machine customer might work directly with an AI agent representing a vendor to oversee payment for an ongoing subscription.
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“Programmable money is transformative for financial services providers, enabling new forms of currency and digital asset markets,” Gartner Senior Director Analyst Christian Stephan said in a statement. “It drives innovation in value creation, financing, and asset exchange, including machine-to-machine trading, reshaping supply and financial value chains.”
What this means for businesses
Technological paradigm shifts tend to carry a lot of marketing hype. That’s especially true in the case of the current AI boom, with many tech pundits declaring AI to be one of, if not the, most consequential inventions in human history.
But as Gartner’s new report helps to illustrate, some of the truly transformative impacts of this new wave of automation — at least in the near-term — are likely to be happening in the background, away from the eyes of consumers. This is also supported by a recent study conducted by MIT, which found that the very small minority of businesses that have seen success with their generative AI initiatives have been applying the technology in back-office functions.
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