Techsnopes highlights tech trends that are crucial to businesses every year. This year’s list includes 12 strategic themes that will help CEOs achieve growth, digitization, and efficiency while also positioning CIOs and IT executives as strategic partners in the firm.
“CEOs recognize the need to drive digital business adoption and are looking for more direct digital routes to communicate with their consumers.

Contents
What are the 12 most important strategic technology trends for 2022, and why are they so important?
Data Fabric is the first trend.
Data fabric allows for the flexible and reliable integration of data sources across platforms and business users, ensuring that data is available wherever it is needed, regardless of its location.
Data fabric may learn and actively indicate where data can be used and updated using analytics. This can help you save up to 70% on data management.
Cybersecurity Mesh is the second trend.
Cybersecurity mesh is a flexible, modular design that connects various security services that are widely spread.
Cybersecurity mesh enables best-of-breed, stand-alone security solutions to collaborate to boost overall security while bringing control points closer to the assets they’re meant to safeguard. It can validate identity, context, and policy adherence in the cloud and non-cloud contexts rapidly and reliably.
Computation for Privacy Enhancement is the third trend.
Privacy-enhancing computation protects the processing of personal data in untrustworthy environments, which is becoming more important as privacy and data protection regulations evolve and consumers’ worries grow.
Privacy-enhancing computation makes use of a number of privacy-protection approaches to extract value from data while still adhering to regulations.
Cloud-Native Platforms are the fourth trend.
Cloud-native platforms are technologies that enable you to create new application architectures that are resilient, elastic, and agile, allowing you to react quickly to digital change.
Cloud-native solutions are an improvement over the typical lift-and-shift approach to the cloud, which misses out on the benefits of cloud and complicates maintenance.
Composable Applications are the fifth trend.
Business-centric modular components are used to create compostable apps.
Composable applications make it easy to reuse and reuse code, reducing the time it takes to bring new software solutions to market and releasing enterprise value.
Decision Intelligence is the sixth trend.
A realistic technique to improving organizational decision-making is decision intelligence. Each choice is modeled as a series of processes, with intelligence and analytics used to inform, learn from, and refine them.
Through the use of augmented analytics, simulations, and AI, decision intelligence may support and enhance human decision-making, as well as potentially automate it.
Hyperautomation is the seventh trend.
Hyperautomation is a method for quickly identifying, vetting, and automating as many business and IT activities as feasible.
Scalability, remote operation, and a business model are all enabled via hyper-automation.
AI Engineering is the eighth trend.
To make AI delivery more efficient, AI engineering automates data, models, and application upgrades.
AI engineering, when combined with robust AI governance, will operationalize AI delivery to assure its long-term economic value.
Distributed Enterprises (Trend #9)
To improve staff experiences, digitalize consumer and partner touchpoints, and build out product experiences, distributed organizations reflect a digital-first, remote-first company strategy.
Remote employees and consumers, who are driving demand for virtual services and hybrid workspaces, benefit from distributed organizations.
Trend number ten is the whole experience.
To accelerate growth, a total experience strategy incorporates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across numerous touchpoints.
Through holistic management of stakeholder experiences, the whole experience may create increased customer and employee confidence, happiness, loyalty, and advocacy.
Autonomic Systems (Trend 11)
Self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their surroundings and dynamically adjust their own algorithms in real-time to maximize their behavior in complex ecosystems are known as autonomous systems.
Autonomic systems are a type of technology that can support new requirements and scenarios, improve performance, and defend against threats without the need for human intervention.
Generative AI is the 12th trend.
Generative AI uses data to learn about artifacts and creates unique new things that are similar to the original but not identical.
Generative AI has the potential to create new types of creative output, such as video, and to speed up R&D cycles in a variety of disciplines, from medical to product development.
Read more: The Best of CES 2022: The Most Important New Technology
What are the technical developments that are driving digital business?
For CIOs and IT executives, the top strategic technology trends will advance digital capabilities and drive success by addressing common business concerns. They provide a blueprint for differentiating your company from competitors, achieving business goals, and establishing CIOs and IT executives as strategic partners.
Each one achieves one of three major goals:
Engineering Trust: This segment’s technologies help to build a more resilient and efficient IT foundation by ensuring data is securely linked and processed across cloud and non-cloud settings, allowing for cost-effective IT foundation expansion.
Sculpting Change: You may scale and expedite your organization’s digitization by releasing innovative new-technology solutions in this area. These technological advancements enable you to keep up with the quick speed of change by swiftly developing applications to automate business processes, improve artificial intelligence (AI), and enable faster, smarter decisions.
Accelerating Growth: By using strategic technology developments in this industry, you’ll be able to unleash IT force multipliers that will help you win more revenue and market share. These trends work together to help you increase value creation and improve your digital capabilities.
Watch how three trends — generative AI, cybersecurity mesh, and decision intelligence — are driving strategic change right now.
Questions about top strategic technological topics that are frequently asked
Read more: The Best of CES 2022: The Most Important New Technology
Each year, how does Gartner choose its top strategic technology trends?
We choose the top technology trends based on CEO priorities for their companies and the technology demands that arise, which are passed down to CIOs and IT leaders.
Download the eBook to learn how your peers are implementing these trends and what your next steps should be.
How can businesses make the most of the top technology on the list?
These trends should be used by CIOs and IT leaders to determine how their organizations’ implementation and technology adoptions should progress over the next three to five years.
What impact will technology developments have on the business?
Organizations that embrace and plan for these trends will develop long-term strategies for dependable and long-term business growth.
What impact will these breakthroughs have on businesses in the long run?
Some of these advances are foundational technological capabilities essential to compete in a digital environment, while others are business-oriented capabilities that help companies stay ahead of the competition.
How can we find the right technology and trends to help with operational resilience and business model change?
IT executives are in a unique position to assess whether trends and disruptions pose a threat or an opportunity. They can affect company transformation by leveraging their business and technical skills to comprehend the influence of trends on their businesses.
How can we integrate the evaluation of emerging technologies into the larger framework of nontechnology developments, taking into account broader political, economic, social, legal, and environmental trends?
Gartner’s TPESTRE analysis provides a framework for evaluating various trends. It enables IT, executives, to incorporate a comprehensive awareness of wider implications into their technology planning.
Which strategic and emergent technology developments are having the most impact?
Different trends will have different effects on different organizations. Because most of the trends are tightly intertwined, different combinations of technology are likely to be necessary to compete at different stages of the business growth cycle. Understanding the short- and long-term business objectives of their firms will help CIOs and IT leaders choose the top trends.
Read more: 7 tech terms you’ll hear a lot in 2022