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Forrester: Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2024

GenAI, TuringBots, And IoT Security Poised To Deliver Fastest ROI

According to Forrester's The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024 report, generative AI (genAI) for visual content, genAI for language, TuringBots, and IoT security are the top emerging technologies that will deliver the most immediate ROI for businesses in 2024 and beyond.

With new technologies emerging seemingly every day, business and technology leaders need to time those investments based on value, risk, and potential payout timelines. Forrester organizes its top emerging technologies by benefit horizon to help with these decisions.

Emerging technologies that will offer significant benefits within the next two years

GenAI for visual content: Advanced machine learning models that generate images or video from text, audio, or video prompts, this technology will help firms generate visual content for marketing, experiences, and products.

GenAI for language: GenAI for language is already delivering value in customer support and content creation but continues to advance at a blinding pace. It is accelerating many other technologies as it goes.

TuringBots: Accelerated by advancements in genAI for language, these AI-powered software robots help developers build applications that deliver more than just code generation.

IoT security: The proliferation of devices has led to an exponential explosion in security attacks, raising the importance of security for IoT devices. Vendors are competing and colliding in a rush to offer capabilities.

Midterm emerging technologies that will deliver benefits in the next two to five years

AI agents: The role of autonomous workplace assistants or AI agents has expanded beyond the back office and employee assistance to customer-facing automation. These AI agents will grow increasingly sophisticated to better understand and respond to nuance and context.

Autonomous mobility: This technology will accelerate commercial and urban transportation ecosystem collaborations to orchestrate personalized mobility experiences for both customers and businesses.

Edge intelligence: Advanced edge intelligence capabilities such as edge machine learning are still not yet common, even though many foundational elements like Apple foundation models are becoming available.

Quantum security: This technology will overhaul security systems for on-premises and cloud compute, storage and network infrastructure, commercial off-the-shelf software, commercial software-as-a-service offerings, and in-house built software.

Emerging technologies that will take at least five more years to deliver tangible value for most firms and use cases

Extended reality (XR): Only 8% of US online adults own a virtual-reality headset, and just 16% have used an augmented-reality device or app. While XR is advancing in training and onboarding, companies are resisting investing in tools like these until they see broad adoption.

Zero Trust edge (ZTE): ZTE technology has the potential to protect remote workers, retail outlets, and branch offices with embedded local security, but only a handful of true ZTE solutions exist today, and legacy devices add additional management complexity.

"Tech leaders must be able to identify the right use cases and quantify potential benefits, costs, and risks across multiple horizons," says Brian Hopkins, Forrester VP, Eerging Tech Portfolio. "They need to spread investments out, with shorter-term technologies delivering quick returns and longer-term bets requiring more effort, more foundational investment, and the capacity to manage more risk."

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Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

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Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

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64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Forrester: Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2024

GenAI, TuringBots, And IoT Security Poised To Deliver Fastest ROI

According to Forrester's The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024 report, generative AI (genAI) for visual content, genAI for language, TuringBots, and IoT security are the top emerging technologies that will deliver the most immediate ROI for businesses in 2024 and beyond.

With new technologies emerging seemingly every day, business and technology leaders need to time those investments based on value, risk, and potential payout timelines. Forrester organizes its top emerging technologies by benefit horizon to help with these decisions.

Emerging technologies that will offer significant benefits within the next two years

GenAI for visual content: Advanced machine learning models that generate images or video from text, audio, or video prompts, this technology will help firms generate visual content for marketing, experiences, and products.

GenAI for language: GenAI for language is already delivering value in customer support and content creation but continues to advance at a blinding pace. It is accelerating many other technologies as it goes.

TuringBots: Accelerated by advancements in genAI for language, these AI-powered software robots help developers build applications that deliver more than just code generation.

IoT security: The proliferation of devices has led to an exponential explosion in security attacks, raising the importance of security for IoT devices. Vendors are competing and colliding in a rush to offer capabilities.

Midterm emerging technologies that will deliver benefits in the next two to five years

AI agents: The role of autonomous workplace assistants or AI agents has expanded beyond the back office and employee assistance to customer-facing automation. These AI agents will grow increasingly sophisticated to better understand and respond to nuance and context.

Autonomous mobility: This technology will accelerate commercial and urban transportation ecosystem collaborations to orchestrate personalized mobility experiences for both customers and businesses.

Edge intelligence: Advanced edge intelligence capabilities such as edge machine learning are still not yet common, even though many foundational elements like Apple foundation models are becoming available.

Quantum security: This technology will overhaul security systems for on-premises and cloud compute, storage and network infrastructure, commercial off-the-shelf software, commercial software-as-a-service offerings, and in-house built software.

Emerging technologies that will take at least five more years to deliver tangible value for most firms and use cases

Extended reality (XR): Only 8% of US online adults own a virtual-reality headset, and just 16% have used an augmented-reality device or app. While XR is advancing in training and onboarding, companies are resisting investing in tools like these until they see broad adoption.

Zero Trust edge (ZTE): ZTE technology has the potential to protect remote workers, retail outlets, and branch offices with embedded local security, but only a handful of true ZTE solutions exist today, and legacy devices add additional management complexity.

"Tech leaders must be able to identify the right use cases and quantify potential benefits, costs, and risks across multiple horizons," says Brian Hopkins, Forrester VP, Eerging Tech Portfolio. "They need to spread investments out, with shorter-term technologies delivering quick returns and longer-term bets requiring more effort, more foundational investment, and the capacity to manage more risk."

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...