As technology advances at a breakneck pace, understanding what’s real and what’s hype has never been more crucial. Gartner’s Hype Cycle is more than just a framework — it’s a vital compass for leaders navigating the disruptive frontier of Emerging Technologies.
I typically share an article about Gartner’s Hype Cycle each year. It does a great job of documenting what technologies are reaching maturity and which technologies’ ascents are being enhanced by the cultural zeitgeist (hype, momentum, great timing, etc.).
Creating a report like this requires a unique blend of technological analysis and insight, along with an acute understanding of human nature and a considerable amount of common sense.
Identifying which technologies are making a real impact (and thus will have a significant effect on the world) is a monumental task.
In my opinion, Gartner’s report is a great benchmark to compare with your perception of reality.
What’s a “Hype Cycle”?
As technology advances, it is human nature to get excited about the possibilities … and to get disappointed when those expectations aren’t met.
The Hype Cycle itself is built around this paradox — the excitement of emerging tech juxtaposed by the oft-inevitable disappointment. This tension forces leaders to recognize both risks and rewards, reminding us that true opportunity often hides behind initial letdowns.
At its core, the Hype Cycle tells us where we are in the product’s timeline – and how long it will likely take the technology to reach maturity. It highlights technologies with the potential to move beyond initial hype and transform how we live and work.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle Report is a considered analysis of market excitement, maturity, and the benefits of various technologies. It aggregates data and distills more than 2,000 technologies into a concise and contextually understandable snapshot of where various emerging technologies sit in their hype cycle.
Here are the five regions of Gartner’s Hype Cycle framework:
- Innovation Trigger (potential technology breakthrough kicks off),
- Peak of Inflated Expectations (Success stories through early publicity),
- Trough of Disillusionment (waning interest),
- Slope of Enlightenment (2nd & 3rd generation products appear), and
- Plateau of Productivity (Mainstream adoption starts).
Understanding this hype cycle framework enables you to ask important questions, such as “How will these technologies impact my business?” and “Which technologies can I trust to stay relevant in 5 years?”
That said, it’s worth acknowledging that the hype cycle can’t predict which technologies will survive the trough of disillusionment and which ones will fade into obscurity.
Some Historical Context …
Before focusing on this year, it’s essential to note that in 2019, Gartner shifted its emphasis towards spotlighting new technologies at the expense of those that would typically persist through multiple iterations of the cycle. This change helps account for the increasing number of innovations and technology introductions we are exposed to compared to the norm when they first started producing this report. As a result, many of the technologies highlighted over the past couple of years (such as Augmented Intelligence, 5G, biochips, and the decentralized web) are now represented within newer modalities or distinctions.
It’s interesting to look at old articles (such as my Hype Cycle article from 2015 and the Hype Cycle article from 2019) and watch how quickly priorities shift as emerging technologies evolve.
2021 marked the introduction of NFTs and advancements in AI. It also focused on the increasing ubiquity of technology. By 2023, Gartner focused on emergent AI, emphasizing the importance of human-centric security and privacy in this new paradigm.
Somehow, for the first time since 2015, I didn’t post about the hype cycle last year. So before exploring this year’s list, here’s a brief recap of Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle.
Themes From Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle
- Autonomous AI – Technologies evolving toward systems that can act with minimal human oversight: e.g., autonomous agents, large action models, machine-customers, humanoid working robots.
- Boosting Developer Productivity – Tools and practices aimed at accelerating software delivery, improving dev flow, collaboration, and enabling higher-velocity innovation (e.g., AI-augmented software engineering, internal developer portals, GitOps).
- Total Experience (TX) – A holistic take on experience: linking customer, employee, user, and multi-experience, enabled by spatial computing, superapps, 6G, and digital twins of customers.
What’s Exciting This Year?
Here is Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2025. Click on the chart below to see a larger version of this year’s Hype Cycle.
This year, the key technologies were bucketed into four major themes.
- Autonomous Business describes a future where machine-customers, AI agents, autonomous sourcing, and self-adapting products converge beyond automation to create self-governing value systems. It’s almost entirely closed systems acting and transacting with minimal human intervention. This represents a shift from AI as a co-pilot to AI as the whole flight crew, and the passengers. A question to be asking yourself is “Where in your value-chain could a machine act as customer, supplier, or decision-point, rather than a human?”
- Hypermachinity continues the conversation around advanced systems and autonomy, but takes it one step further. This is about intelligent systems that outperform traditionally hybrid processes via context-aware intelligence, sensors, meta-computing, and embodied AI. In this pillar, the boundary between the digital and physical becomes increasingly blurred. A question you should be asking is “Which processes in your business remain manual, fragmented, or isolated … and might become fully autonomous systems in the next wave?”
- Augmented Humanity represents the evolution of the human-machine partnership. The goal isn’t to replace humans, but to amplify them. This is clearly a topic we discuss frequently. AI won’t take most people’s jobs, but someone who uses AI effectively will. What upskilling, training, or redesign of roles will be required to shift from “humans doing tasks” to “humans supervising and collaborating with systems”?
- The final theme is Techno-Societal Fragility. As technology becomes increasingly embedded in society, more aspects of daily life fade into the background; the risks of societal disruption, disinformation, privacy erosion, and other threats increase. The downsides of AI aren’t just side-discussions now. They are strategic imperatives. Organizations (and governments) must balance innovation with pragmatism, resilience, trust, and ethics. Do you have a strategy and budget for safety and resilience, in addition to speed and efficiency?
Implications for Leaders
While the technologies and scale have evolved, the discussion remains remarkably similar to that of 2023. For the past few years, the discussion has centered on the spread of emergent technologies, followed by how to respond to their increasing ubiquity.
Moreso than ever, it’s about building systems that help adopt these new technologies efficiently … while also protecting yourself from making mistakes at lightspeed.
Still, too many organizations treat these technologies as experimental. That ship has sailed. You must adopt a platform-thinking approach to stay competitive: scalable, governed, and operable systems.
Platform thinking will underpin not just tech stacks, but entire business and governance models — companies will win or lose based on their ability to orchestrate AI, humans, and data seamlessly.
ROI for these technologies has shifted from simplification and automation to new capabilities and profit centers.
It may seem silly to make this juxtaposition in an article about hype cycles, but the game is shifting from hype to execution.
While “experiments” aren’t enough anymore, you don’t need a flawless system to begin. You can (and should) start with small, controlled tests that show the process is sound, the team can operate the tools effectively, and the safeguards function as intended. Establish reliability and build competence first. Once those foundations are in place, increasing scale & speed becomes an advantage rather than a risk.
A final note, tools and technologies don’t change the game by themselves — you must ask what game the tool makes possible. Shift your focus from “Can we build it?” to “What does this let us become?”
Hope that helps.
Onwards!