Gartner Identifies 12 Disruptive Technologies for Future Business Systems By John P. Mello Jr. April 8, 2025 5:00 AM PT ADVERTISEMENT SMB Software Companies: Playbook for Expansion & Growth Proven strategies to scale your company, grow market share, and win more customers. Download the free playbook today. AI will become the new UI, spending will increase to counter disinformation, and increased use of Earth intelligence gathered from space will be disruptive technologies in the near future, according to a report released Monday by global technology research firm Gartner. The three technologies were among 12 that Gartner predicted would define the future of business systems. Technology leaders must prioritize these over the next five years, as they present competitive opportunities in the near term and will eventually grow to become standard throughout businesses, Gartner contended. “Technology leaders must take action now to gain a first-mover advantage with these technologies,” Gartner Vice President Analyst Bill Ray said in a statement. “Innovative advancements like generative-AI-enabled code architecture, disinformation security, and Earth intelligence will provide the differentiation needed to help enterprises pull ahead of the pack in terms of data and product offerings.” AI Replaces Staid UI Gartner maintained that gen-AI solutions using free-form text and multimedia inputs/outputs will displace the conventional form-oriented sequential UI in established enterprise applications and enable new user scenarios. A user interface provides a way for a human to navigate and communicate with a machine naturally, explained Sandi Besen, an applied AI researcher at IBM and Neudesic, a global professional services company. “Since language models enable a system to communicate with humans natively through voice, text, or visually, we might not have as much need for a ‘user interface’ the way we know it today,” she told TechNewsWorld. “If you can interact with the computer using natural language, you don’t really need a secondary UI,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore. “The AI becomes your user interface,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Much like you don’t need Windows to talk to someone else, you won’t need a UI to interact with your computer.” Besen pointed out, however, that some things are still difficult to control, like input validation, without a UI. “We are seeing the emergence of a ‘dynamic UI’ that adapts based on the inputs the user needs to provide the LLM rather than forcing the user to follow a predefined flow,” she said. Gartner Vice President Analyst Ray Valdes added in a statement, “To remain competitive, traditional enterprise application software vendors will need to refactor applications to serve composable gen-AI solutions that are invoked on demand via textual and multimodal prompts.” Because of that, Gartner predicts that by 2029, more than 50% of user interactions linked to enterprise business processes will leverage large language models to bypass the UI layer in traditional enterprise applications, up from less than 5% today. New Interest in Disinformation Security Gartner also predicts that by 2030, at least half of enterprises will have adopted products or services to address disinformation security, up from less than 5% in 2024. It explained that disinformation security is an emerging discipline focused on threats from outside the corporate-controlled network. It includes a suite of technologies, such as deepfake detection, impersonation prevention, and reputation protection, that can address disinformation to help enterprises discern trust, protect their brand, and secure their online presence. “Attackers are using AI to impersonate executives, manipulate communications, and erode confidence in what people see and hear online,” said Patrick Tiquet, vice president for security and architecture at Keeper Security, a password management and online storage company in Chicago. “For enterprises, this means protecting infrastructure isn’t enough,” he told TechNewsWorld. “They also need to secure the people behind it, ensuring digital interactions remain authentic and trusted.” Ishpreet Singh, chief information officer at Black Duck Software, an applications security company in Burlington, Mass., explained that the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence technologies, such as deepfakes, generative AI, and automated bots, enables malicious actors to create highly realistic and targeted false narratives at unprecedented scale and speed. “These sophisticated disinformation campaigns can quickly influence public perception, distort market realities, and undermine organizational credibility, directly threatening brand value and long-term stakeholder trust,” he told TechNewsWorld. Gartner Senior Director Analyst Alfredo Ramirez IV added in a statement: “Disinformation attacks use external infrastructure like social media and originate from areas with limited legal oversight. Tech leaders must add ‘disinformation-proofing’ to products by using AI/machine learning for content verification and data provenance tracking to help users discern the truth.” Earth Intelligence for Business Insights Gartner also predicts that by 2028, 80% of major Earth surface assets globally will be monitored by active satellites. Earth intelligence uses AI to analyze satellite, aerial, and ground data to monitor Earth’s assets and activities, providing insights for decision-making, it explained. “That doesn’t mean maps and charts,” Ray said. “Earth intelligence is delivering numbers on global nickel production, theme park revenue, and the health of wheat crops, to name just a few.” Earth intelligence also includes accurate weather forecasting. “Weather events can adversely impact logistics and supply chains, so being able to better predict them should allow companies to more effectively assure their operations,” Enderle noted. “In addition,” he continued, “weather events can put sites, customers, and employees at risk, so having a better predictive tool will allow companies to better protect these assets.” Given the breadth of applications, Gartner maintained that Earth intelligence is applicable to all industries and enterprises. Defense has been the first adopter, but improvements in data quality and analysis techniques have rapidly expanded the use cases. “Earth intelligence applies to every business,” Ray added. “Enterprises can gain an early advantage by creatively and strategically applying Earth intelligence to significantly enhance specific functionalities of existing systems or to compete via net new capabilities.” Disruptive Dozen Gartner organized its Disruptive Dozen into four categories: Application, Infrastructure, Data, and Security. Application disrupters include intelligent simulation, AI-composed applications, and polyfunctional robots. “Polyfunctional robots will be capable of performing an increasing number of jobs currently done by humans,” Enderle said. “Putting in place the support structure for these robots and programs to retrain or eliminate the then redundant employees will require a great deal of planning, time, and effort and will certainly disrupt operations during implementation, particularly if the site is unionized.” Infrastructure disrupters include algorithm-aligned silicon, low power/high compute, and sensor fusion. Among the data disrupters are Earth intelligence, hypersynthetic data, and domain language models. “Hypersynthetic data will make creating LLMs far easier and faster,” Enderle said. “However, the potential for this data to be unreliable increases significantly the farther you get from data with a more factual foundation. Quality has suffered significantly during the AI rollout, and hypersynthetic data could increase that exposure significantly.” Besen explained that domain language models are LLMs trained extensively within a “domain” of knowledge rather than on general data like GPT-4o. “They will be important, particularly for tasks that require a very deep understanding of specialized subjects like biology or chemistry, and which don’t require knowledge or the ability to reason outside their specific domain,” she said. “A domain model for biology might be excellent for interpreting patient symptoms and explaining a physician’s diagnosis to a user — but not helping them plan their upcoming travel itinerary.” Security disrupters include digital ethics, disinformation security, and preemptive cybersecurity. “Preemptive cybersecurity stands out because it shifts security from reaction to prediction,” Tiquet explained. “As threat actors increasingly weaponize AI and automation, waiting for an alert is no longer enough,” he continued. “Preemptive systems use AI-driven insights to uncover vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and anomalies before they’re exploited.” “It’s a disruptive change because it forces organizations to rethink traditional tools and adopt continuous, intelligent threat anticipation across every layer — from endpoints to identities to cloud workloads,” he said. Singh added, “This forward-looking approach is especially critical in today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, where the increasing complexity of interconnected systems — including IoT devices, cloud services, and remote work platforms — creates a broader and more intricate array of security challenges.” John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John. Leave a Comment Click here to cancel reply. Please sign in to post or reply to a comment. New users create a free account. Related Stories More by John P. Mello Jr. view all More in Emerging Tech