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Gartner's Top Strategic Predictions for 2024 and Beyond

In 2023, generative AI unleashed massive creativity and productivity potential. Our top predictions for 2024 show every strategic conversation needs to include GenAI.

By Ava McCartney | 4-minute read | December 04, 2023

Big Picture

Understand how this year’s predictions shape your thinking and strategic planning

Our annual list of top strategic predictions empowers savvy, forward-thinking executive leaders inside and outside of IT to examine what it means for AI to move from a tool to a collaborator and creator. Consider these predictions as you would planning assumptions: Determine the time horizon for each prediction, and evaluate near-term flags to determine whether the prediction is increasingly or decreasingly likely to come true.

Gartner’s 2024 predictions, which we expect your organization will come up against in the next three to five years, fall into three categories, and encompass the most critical areas of technology and business evolution.

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Category No. 1: GenAI makes people better and more powerful personally and professionally

• Individuals can use GenAI to create better resumes, reports, work products and interactions with others. By 2026, 30% of workers will leverage digital “charisma filters,” which make you seem better than you are, to achieve previously unattainable advances in their careers.
• Because GenAI can boost the output of the entire workforce, countries with large, inexpensive workforces will not have as pronounced an advantage. By 2027, the productivity value of AI will be recognized as a primary economic indicator of national power, largely due to widespread gains in workforce productivity.
• GenAI can help create a more diverse workforce inclusive of those in a wide range of age groups, from different educational and ethnic backgrounds, and who are neurodivergent. By 2027, 25% of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse talent to improve business performance.

Category No. 2: Businesses will get better at overcoming their worst traits

• There is a rapidly growing need for more electricity to power computers. GenAI amplifies energy costs and availability. By 2026, half of G20 members will experience monthly electricity rationing, turning energy-aware operations into either a competitive advantage or a major failure risk.
• GenAI can provide modernization plans, refactoring plans, testing and validation, and other capabilities to speed up modernization efforts. By 2027, GenAI tools will be used to explain legacy business applications and create appropriate replacements, reducing modernization costs by 70%.
• Supplementing the workforce with robots can help businesses grow, but this will expose the need to change business operations. By 2028, due to labor shortages, there will be more smart robots than frontline workers in manufacturing, retail and logistics.
• The rise of machine workers and customers is prompting a rethink of key business operations. Through 2026, 30% of large companies will have a dedicated business unit or sales channels to access fast-growing machine customer markets.

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Category No. 3: New threats create new responsibilities and communities

• While GenAI brings a great deal of opportunity, malinformation is a new threat vector. By 2028, enterprise spend dedicated to battling it will surpass $30 billion, cannibalizing 10% of marketing and cybersecurity budgets.
• CEOs must empower a single responsible executive, such as the CISO, to tackle the challenge of malinformation across the organization. By 2027, 45% of CISOs’ remits will expand beyond cybersecurity, due to increasing regulatory pressure and attack surface expansion.
• Unions have historically pressured organizations and governments to protect people before companies. By 2028, motivated by the adoption of generative AI, unionization among knowledge workers will increase by 1,000%.

The story behind the research

From the desk of Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer

“The existence of large language models (LLMs) covers a broad range of creative capabilities that keep building more excitement. But opposite that excitement is healthy skepticism and concerns about risk. Our predictions this year demonstrate how GenAI can pervade any topic. In fact, such conversations started without GenAI are shortsighted.”

3 things to tell your peers

1 Use Gartner predictions as planning assumptions on which to base your strategic plans.

2 Evaluate near-term flags to determine whether a prediction is becoming more or less likely to turn into truth.

3 Anticipate that predictions with longer time horizons are less likely to come true than those with shorter time horizons.

Daryl Plummer is VP, Distinguished Analyst & Gartner Fellow. His research focuses on the strategic issues of cloud computing, digital disruption, and the unfolding of the future through predictions, trends and evolving digital business cycles. Mr. Plummer is a Chief of Research in the Technology & Service Providers Organization, where he helps oversee research across the four roles of General Manager, Product Managers, Product Marketers, and Tech CEOs. In this role, he is responsible for the advancement of research and the promotion of same to solve the critical problems of, and answer the key questions for, tech providers from engineers all the way up to and including the CEO and board of directors. Daryl is also Chief of Research for Cloud computing and a primary analyst covering multiple strategic Cloud topics. He focuses his research on the broad cloud service market, including market trends, forecasts, the cloud vendor landscape and cloud sourcing scenarios. He tracks different cloud usage cases, including public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios and is the originator of the topic of Distributed Cloud Computing. Covering cloud strategy and evolution requires one to see how end user scenarios are evolving in the context of technology and service provider strategies that are producing cloud innovations at an ever-increasing speed. Mr. Plummer provides a perspective on the key phenomena which will drive the largest segments of change.