Gartner’s list of 10 top strategic technology trends organizations should explore in 2023 pulled out key themes CIOs are targeting as they head into the new year. While overarching trends like sustainability and the metaverse are sure to make an impact, according to the firm, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud are also on the radar.

Frances Karamouzis, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said the list shows organizations “where technologies can help organizations optimize resilience, operations or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, and pioneer with new forms of engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.”

Other top trends on the analyst firm’s list include superapps, applied observability, platform engineering, digital immune system, and wireless value realization, which includes technologies like 5G and Wi-Fi 7.

AI appeared twice on Gartner’s list, in both the optimize and pioneer categories.

The pioneer trend “adaptive AI” refers to systems that continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments based on new data to adapt to changes in real-world circumstances that were not foreseen during initial development.

“This idea of adaptive AI is the next evolution,” Karamouzis said. “We think conditional static AI models are not going to be able to handle the rapid changes. So this is really about getting real time feedback and continually retraining the model while it's in production.”

Optimize trend “AI trust, risk and security management,” or AI TRiSM, refers to a need to implement new capabilities to ensure model reliability, trustworthiness, security, and data protection.

A Gartner survey found that 41% of organizations in the U.S, U.K. and Germany had experienced an AI privacy breach or security incident. Gartner said AI TRiSM requires participants from different business units to work together to implement new measures.

“The investment in AI is so high that one of the things we think is going to bring that number up is TRisM, which is embedding inside the AI algorithms and models this idea of a self healing, or self trust, and risk and security management,” Karamouzis explained.

Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), providing “industry-specific sets of modular capabilities to support specific industry business use cases,” according to Gartner.

Karamouzis said industry cloud predictions is the trend that's drawn the most questions from Gartner’s client base this year.

In her view, the elements of cloud – and now multicloud – also depend on location. With data sovereignty questions being raised more often, Karamouzis said “the cloud will no longer be just ubiquitous and agnostic to everything.”

“There will be some development saying, if you're in the FinTech industry, or you're in a certain part of the healthcare industry, there will be very, very targeted cloud platform innovations at the industry level,” she added. “I think the multi cloud is just a manifestation that will enable this when it needs to be released.”

By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.