The Disruptions That Will Reshape Everything by 2030

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (0:06)
You don't have time to waste searching for answers. Meet AskGartner, our client's AI-powered gateway to Gartner's trusted business and technology insights. No more digging through lengthy reports or generic web results. Want to benchmark your digital transformation? Looking to start piloting agentic AI? Need strategies to respond to cybersecurity threats? AskGartner delivers clear, executive-ready recommendations in seconds. It's where AI stops guessing and starts guiding. Discover how AskGartner can work for you at gartner.com/askgartner.
Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes-Lockhart. We're back covering Gartner's seven disruptions you might not see coming, this time through the year 2030 Every year, distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner fellow Daryl Plummer unveils his updated list of disruptions at Gartner IT Symposium Xpo. And today, you'll hear Daryl give a preview of that presentation. He'll walk through the pivotal disruptions that could accelerate change faster than most leaders realize, from AI sovereignty to quantum attire. Going beyond bold predictions, these insights can serve as a roadmap for recognizing, prioritizing, and responding to forces that will define IT strategy and business value in the years ahead. Now, here's Daryl.

**Daryl Plummer** (1:33)
This is a presentation that we do every year, and we try to talk about things that are going to change for you, and we try to pick things that we think are interesting and relevant to what's happening. The problem is, you, like me, are really straddling the past, the present, and the future. We're looking back at things we've done before and figuring out how we can do them better. We're dealing with the changes we have to face right now, and we're looking towards this future that sometimes seems extremely scary when AI can do anything as capable as a human can. I'm waiting for that, right? It's gonna be great. We asked one question, why do we need that?
And nobody can answer the question. But they finally came to an answer. It's flexibility. We can get a lot more flexibility from AI systems that can do anything. But it made me think about a question that I've asked about a thousand times. If you've seen me do this presentation before, you've heard this question, so you know what's coming, but I want to keep my polling going. I don't wanna break that streak. Here's the question. If you woke up one day and found the person that you love most in the world was a machine and you never knew it, would you stay or would you go? Show of hands, who would stay? All right, got a few. Who would go? You're out of there. All right. And those who didn't raise your hands are waiting to find out if you can reprogram it, right?
Been telling that joke for 12 years. The reality is it's a thing that I use to gauge where people are in dealing with the future that's coming, because we're dealing in a world today where it's hard to tell the difference in some cases and in 20 to 50 years, wow, will there be a difference? So that's the kind of thing we're talking about when we talk about disruption. And I'll get into some that are a little closer to the day and we'll go through it. So let's see if we can get started. The Gartner Futures Lab is a group that actually looks around corners and looks to the future to get there before you do. We can see what the risks are, we can see what you're going to face and tell you why they're important before you have the time to look up from what you're worried about right now. And this is a Gartner Futures Lab Deliverable. And this year we're talking about Cognitive Spheres of Influence, where we have two of them that are fighting with one another. One sphere of influence is technology. We all know it. AI is everything to everyone right now. And we're either having to live with it, deal with it or just try to ignore it. But either way, it's changing our world. The other one is behavioral, where we have to change the way we think about things, the way we do things. We look at our children and they think differently than we do. They don't have to memorize things because they can always look it up. They don't have to actually worry about being able to figure something out because something will figure it out for them. And we look at that and say, that's horrible. But remember when you looked at your parents and your grandparents, they did some things that you probably thought were kind of weird. Okay, remember joined up cursive writing? Do you still do that? You do it, right? My eight year old kids don't know how to do it. And when I tell them, they need to learn, they say, dad. And that's the one word that they say that I have no answer to. The notion is that there are things that we believe are vital and important to our society, our culture, our art, our style. And they might not believe that. So as we change our behaviors to fit these technologies, we have to fight to see what we won't lose. We have to fight to see what we want to continue that is valuable to us as human beings, because we are the thing that ultimately matters. So we'll get into these seven disruptions and hopefully you'll see how either technology or behavior is adjusted because of them. Now this is our disruption scale. The disruption scale is a scale that's determined to help you figure out how to recognize, prioritize, and respond to disruptions that are either near or far away. It is a snapshot in time. And it is modeled after the Richter scale, by the way, if you're, you know, the keen eye noticed that, all right. It's a logarithmic scale. From the bottom to the top, it becomes more impactful. At the bottom, it's enhancing markets. That's like putting catalytic converters in a car engine, where you enhance the existing market to make it less polluting. That's great. But then when you want to go up, you extend the market and you say, well, wait a minute, what if we didn't just stop the pollution from the gas powered engines, we added electricity. So we got hybrid cars on the road alongside gas cars. We move up and we say, we're going to transform the market. That's where we are today. These electronic vehicles, fully electronic, are great and you know what made them great? The car started looking sexy and they got faster than some of the gas powered sports cars. That was when people started saying, oh, I can have one now, it's no longer a Prius. That was a good thing for us because demand went up. Now we're going to go farther. We get to reinventing markets where we say, no more cars on the road, you finally get your flying car. You can hop in, and by the way, they have existed for quite a while. It's just most of us are scared to get in them, and we don't want them flying past our bedroom window at night. We have to think about how it changes our behavior and how the technology can make things happen. Lastly, revolutionizing. It's when the whole world is changed by it. The World Wide Web changed the entire world, and it was only invented in 1991 The Internet in 1969, but the Web is what changed the entire world. So we're talking about disruptions on this scale. And today, you'll notice all the new disruptions I'm going to go through here popping up on the left. To the right, there are historical disruptions that you can compare the new ones to, to get an idea of how, what you have to do, how much change you'll have to face. So we're going to use this chart a lot here to get through all of these. We've only got seven, and we'll get through them in an expeditious fashion. So let's look at where this would be in 2030 Notice how they move up. Right now, 2020, now they're down at the bottom. It's hard to get all the way up to the top. I think we might be being a little ambitious about a few of these, but this is where we think they will wind up being in 2030 So let's start. The first one, one of the funnest ones that is there, we call it quantum attire. And the biggest fight we had about this one was people saying, why quantum? What did you do? It's like that movie, the movie Ant Man. Did you see Ant Man? You remember the scene where he was in there and they were arguing and they kept talking about quantum, this and quantum. He said, do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything? That's the way it felt. Like we were just throwing quantum on there. But what we're saying is material science is beginning to enter the quantum realm. And we're saying that material science has become so flexible that you may be able to buy one outfit for the rest of your life, because the outfit will change itself to look like what it needs to look like. They have the physical characteristics it needs based on what you are doing at the moment. If you're out in the cold or if you happen to be in our one-on-one tent, you know it's freezing like the Arctic, your outfit will actually change to make you warmer. And I could definitely pay for that. So we're talking about this world where the outfits begin to take on different forms, different shapes, different colors, different styles to fit our mood and our mode. And those things are very good if we like it. Now if you're a retailer, especially a clothing retailer, this doesn't sound very good to you because you want to sell many clothes. You don't want to sell one outfit. But the idea is, if you only have to buy one, will it fit all the circumstances? Now you know you're going to want more than one. I have five reel-to-reel tape decks in my house, all right? Most of you know what a reel-to-reel tape deck is? I'm finding the more I say things like this, a lot of people don't know. But I have them because I can, not because I need them. You'll have multiple clothing outfits because you can, not just because you need them. But these personal outfits will adapt to you. The fashion statement becomes a technology statement, just like your Apple watch. If you've got an Apple watch on, you know it's a crappy watch. But it's a really cool little device. When people see it, they think, yeah, he's in the in crowd. I don't own one, right? I have a lot of old style watches. But technology becomes a signature to the rest of the world. And when you can wear a high tech thing, sometimes you will. And that's why you'll buy multiple pieces of clothing. So which brands will you support in this world? Will the brand shift depending on what environment you're in? If you really have this goal, then the brands are gonna have to follow suit and they're gonna have to follow you as the attire changes. So this is at 25 Enhancing Markets. We're just adding catalytic converters. We're just getting these clothing to actually show people that it can work at this point. But eventually, it moves into transforming, where the apparel manufacturing industry could be revolutionized. This is something that we see in a transformative mode by 2030 So when you look at that and you start thinking about what happens to brands in that time, if they don't keep up, because the brands can change. It's like the virtual reality mirror or the augmented reality mirror that exists in jewelry stores in some cases. You can look at yourself in the mirror and see what you would look like wearing certain jewelry. Now, what if you could do that and buy the jewelry or the clothing by just saying, buy this, and you don't know what brand, you don't know what retailer, you don't know what outlet it came from. It revolutionizes these types of things. Also, things like governmental policy will be revolutionized and disrupted because governmental policy has to actually confront issues like subversive activity. Right now, you have cameras filming you all the time. We're worried about a big brother society. Thank you, we've been living in one for the last 10, 15 years. And everything's being seen, but some people wear makeup that camouflages their appearance from cameras so they can't be identified. What if you had clothing that could do that too? Then you go into something, you do something bad, you run out, run around a corner, your clothing change, all the security guards run past you because they thought it was a guy wearing blue. But you're not wearing red. So the notion here is that these kinds of things are going to be disrupted. And you have to start thinking about planning the demise of shopping malls because I don't think they're ever going to go away because when I see people in malls, they're not buying anything. They're hanging around talking, they're eating ice cream, they're playing. But malls sell clothes and if they don't have to sell as many, do we need as many? So these kinds of implications are there. The societal shifts are going to come with them. You know, will it be okay to wear certain colors at certain times of the year and will you change them? So that's our first disruption is about how you look and what you wear.