Unpacking Gartner’s analysis and predictions on the digital human market

Astronaut Neil Armstrong once said: "Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year, and yet far too little for the next 10."

Well, Gartner has been trying to remedy that situation for quite a while now, at least in the world of technology. Every year since 1995, the research firm has published its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies to keep track of the most promising up-and-coming innovations. 

Put simply, it forecasts the next big thing (or things) in tech.

What will no doubt have been music to Armstrong's ears is that the Hype Cycle doesn't just focus on the upcoming 12 months. Its predictions are for the emerging technologies that it believes will have the biggest impact on business and society over the next two to 10 years.

Innovators around the world have been using Gartner’s hype cycle to get internal buy-in on the technologies they have faith in eventually becoming mainstream. And when technologies naturally go past their peak of inflated expectations, the hype cycle helps us keep the faith that a rise towards the plateau of productivity is coming.

With the most recent hype cycle now cemented in history, we thought we'd take a little time to explain what we think is interesting about Gartner’s most recent predictions, and what they might mean for marketers and brands. 

What is Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies? 

We've given a brief outline of what the Hype Cycle is, but let's dig a little deeper. Gartner narrows down more than 2,000 technologies and applied frameworks that it profiles each year into a top 25 "must-know" emerging technologies and trends. 

They must be nascent innovations that aren't considered breakthrough technologies yet, which is why Gartner thinks they will create the biggest competitive advantages for firms that are early adopters. 

The Hype Cycle is illustrated as a timeline, with each technology placed within one of five evolutionary phases: 

• Innovation trigger: when a technology first gets people talking 
• Peak of inflated expectations: when proof of the technology's usefulness hasn't quite matched its hype. 
• Trough of disillusionment: when the early excitement wears off and performance issues occur, and ROI expectations aren't met. 
• Slope of enlightenment: when early adopters begin to see the promised results and other organizations want to get on board.
• Plateau of productivity: when an innovation goes mainstream. 

Of course, not every technology will go through these five stages, but Gartner's approach provides a useful visual representation of where a particular emerging technology is in its lifecycle.

What's in Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2022/2023

So, what are Gartner's top picks for the next two to 10 years? They fit into three broad categories: 

1. Expand immersive environments (such as the metaverse) 
2. Accelerated AI automation
3. Optimized technologist delivery (I.e cloud sustainability, augmented FinOps) 

We're not going to name all 25 emerging technologies, but there are several that are particularly relevant to marketers – including our own area of expertise, digital humans. So let's start there. 

Digital humans 

Understandably, we're pretty stoked that digital humans are one of Gartner's hottest emerging technologies – especially as this isn't the first time they've found themselves on the Hype Cycle. They were also on last year's list, indicating that Gartner remains confident that digital humans will be a transformative technology over the coming years. 

On the Hype Cycle timeline, digital humans currently sit near the end of the Innovation Trigger section, meaning Gartner doesn't quite think they've reached a level where people have overly high expectations. Nevertheless, people have been talking about them for some time.

Which fits with the reality that we’re seeing. Currently, it’s the front-runners in brand innovation who are furthest ahead in their digital human projects. The first-movers are within innovation powerhouse industries like retail, CPG, automotive, technology and telco, to name a few, as well as major innovative brands like Deutsche Telekom, L’Oreal and most of the major tech companies.

Brands that we've worked with are already seeing positive ROI from digital humans, so we wouldn't be surprised to see them progress confidently onto Gartner's 'slope of enlightenment' in the coming years.

The metaverse 

Another technological trend that's in the innovation trigger phase is the metaverse. Despite recent cooling on the technology in 2023, we're very excited about the metaverse and have been surveying our clients about their brand's approach to unified virtual worlds.

One year ago, the majority (65%) of our guests were still surveying the landscape, but 25% have already created a metaverse strategy. A minority (5%) have even got campaigns up and running. If you'd like to know more about how companies are preparing for the metaverse, you can check out our recent webinar: Mapping your journey into the metaverse, or see a quick recap below:

Gartner predicts the tech won't hit the 'productivity plateau' stage for at least 10 years –understandable given the task involved in building new digital worlds. So while it's still early days for the metaverse there are many interesting opportunities available for brands that begin thinking about their strategies now.

As our CEO, Danny Tomsett, wrote for Forbes, consider this period more Web 2.5 than Web 3.0, and you’ll avoid falling into the trough of disillusionment.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

NFTs are our first entry that Gartner believes has slipped beyond the innovation trigger stage and rode high (albeit shortly) on a wave of inflated expectations. It might be safe to say that now in 2023, it is deep into the trough of disillusionment, despite being an industry worth $22 billion in December 2021.

It's not hard to see the benefits of NFTs as the technology climbs naturally out of this dip.

An NFT is a digital asset linked to a blockchain record. Typically, they are unique artworks, music, in-game or digital items, and other media. The most expensive single NFT sold to date is artist Mike 'Beeple' Winkelmann's 'The First 5,000 Days', which is a collage of 5,000 pictures that he made (one every day) over the last 13 years. It's also far from the only eye-wateringly expensive NFT sold over the last few years. 

Where will the market go next? Gartner predicts NFTs will plateau within the next two to five years. But beyond what some consider crazy evaluations for digital art, there’s real function in NFTs that will continue to be explored as the digital world expands.

Web3

Decentralization is a common theme on the Hype Cycle this year. For example, NFTs are linked to blockchain, which is a decentralized ledger. Gartner also lists decentralized identities as an emerging technology, which aim to put people back in control of their data.

Underpinning all of this we have Web3 – the idea for a new version of the World Wide Web. It's an internet that puts decentralization at its core. Rather than having a web that's run by a handful of Big Tech firms that own the largest data centers, Web3 seeks to spread the oversight of networks and protocols across users worldwide. 

According to Gartner, Web3 is at peak hype level at the moment, so there's likely to be a slump in interest when the trough of disillusionment beckons. That said, we can expect Web3 to begin showing real benefits within five to 10 years. 

Digital twins of customers 

This sounds a lot like digital humans, right? Not quite. A digital twin of a customer is a way for brands to anticipate (and simulate) consumer behavior. 

Marketers use a customer's physical and online interactions to create a 'digital twin' of the individual, which tries to predict how they'd react in the future to various scenarios and experiences. In other words, they're superpowered buyer personas. 

Digital twins of customers have been on Gartner's Hype Cycle for the past few years, and they've not quite progressed past the innovation trigger stage. But along with digital humans, the metaverse and Web3, they could become key to building more immersive digital marketing experiences sooner rather than later. 

Causal AI 

One of the issues with the predictive ability of deep learning and AI technologies is that they struggle to differentiate between correlation and causation (a common problem in human decision-making too). 

Is a particular variable causing another variable to occur, or do they simply occur more frequently together? Causal AI aims to identify the true causal relationships in the data it examines, so that predictive models can be more accurate. 

In theory, marketers could use this to better understand the factors that are really driving their customers' behavior, while disregarding correlated (but irrelevant) information. It's very early days for this technology, but it’s close enough to warrant it being on Gartner’s radar, which is exciting enough for us.

What does Gartner predict for digital humans?

Okay, let's talk about digital humans in a bit more detail – they are, after all, very much in our area of expertise. Research from the firm answers some of these pressing questions:

• Defining a digital human;
• Predicting digital human market size;
• Predicting breakthrough use cases of digital humans;
• The role of digital humans in the future.

Let’s dive into each.‍

Defining digital humans:

Gartner provides a clear definition of what a digital human is: 

"Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that have some of the characteristics, personality, knowledge and mindset of a human."

No complaints from us on that front. And while the most recent Hype Cycle doesn't do a deep dive into digital humans, that's largely because the analyst firm also provides lots of market predictions.

Predicting digital human market size and growth:

By 2035 (admittedly some time away yet), Gartner predicts that the digital human economy will be a market worth an estimated US$125 billion. By comparison, the chatbot market will be around $5 billion, as users presumably show preference to more complete AI interfaces.

More immediately, Gartner says that 50% of B2B buyers will interact with a digital human in the buying cycle by 2026. 

But it’s not just B2B brands who’ll soon be using these real-time AI avatars. By 2027, the “majority of B2C enterprise CMOs will have a dedicated budget for digital humans in metaverse experiences”.

Predicting breakthrough use cases of digital humans:

According to the firm, "use cases abound" for digital human technology across multiple sectors, including communications, HR training, medical care and customer service.

But it’s in the sales and marketing sphere where we’re finding some of the most immediate ROI. 

“The digital human economy is going to revolutionize the composition of traditional sales teams and grow to become a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars,” says Noah Elkin, VP of the Gartner sales practice.

It’s certainly something we can attest to. Some of the earliest signs of ROI in digital humans has come from their ability to nurture, guide, educate and convert web visitors.

By spending time with potential customers, digital humans are designed to take any doubt people might have about products or their ability to make a purchasing decision and slowly turn it into confidence. Confidence that they now understand the product, and confidence that they’ve talked to an expert who knows best. They may not always convert from there, but they are more likely to – almost twice as likely for some of our clients.

The role of digital humans in the future:

What makes 2022's Hype Cycle particularly interesting is the possible interplay between the other emerging technologies and digital humans. For example, we expect digital humans to feature prominently in the metaverse, enabling companies to have both digital employees and brand ambassadors autonomously interacting with customers to enrich the consumer experience and reinforce brand values. 

Gartner says: "organizations are already planning on using digital humans to act as identified digital agents within metaverse environments for customer service, support, sales and other interactions with current and potential customers."

We were stoked to recently be listed in Gartner’s 10 Metaverse Tech Innovators for 2023. Not long after, we launched our new SDK for building AR and VR digital human experiences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and it's likely we'll see more innovative use cases and deployments as digital human innovation continues to grow.

What does all this mean for marketers and brands?

Digital humans, decentralization, Web3, the metaverse – it can be a bit overwhelming to keep track of emerging technologies and what they can do for your brand. Staying up to date with the latest studies and research is a big ask for marketers, most of whom no doubt have enough on their plate as it is

But Gartner's Emerging Technology Hype Cycle gives a refined snapshot of what innovation teams and other professionals are working with now or could be in the near future. And the firm has a good track record of predicting some of the breakthrough technologies that will benefit businesses in the future. 

In fact, if we go back to its 2012 Hype Cycle, we can see many things that are commonplace today: big data, gamification, hybrid cloud, 3D printing, bring-your-own-device policies, crowdsourcing, predictive analytics and more. 

Digital humans join a number of other technologies that possess huge potential – such as the metaverse – but they also have quite a way to go before they are fully mainstream. And yet, with many innovations it's often the companies that are early adopters that enjoy the biggest productivity gains down the line. 

This is why some brands are already starting their digital human journeys now in order to get ahead.

Are you interesting in getting a head start? If so, our digital human buyer’s guide is probably your best place to start. This outlines what a digital human project typically looks like, what considerations you need to make, and what pain points you can look to solve.

Our eBook even explains when a digital human project might simply not be the best option for you, and what alternatives you may like to look at instead. It’s totally free; just click here or below to download.

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