Which technologies will shape 2027?

What the research shows

Gartner published its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2027 on 20 October 2026. Its central message is that the conversation moves from adoption to governance: chief information officers are no longer deciding whether AI works, but how to scale autonomous systems safely, govern machine behaviour and stay resilient.

The trends fall into three themes. The first, the non-textual AI frontier, covers large quantitative models, speech reasoning models and world models, which extend AI from text to numbers, conversation and simulated physical environments. Gartner predicts that by 2030 large quantitative models will replace large language models in 25% of strategic forecasting and operational modelling tasks, and that more than 70% of enterprise voice interactions will be handled autonomously by speech reasoning models.

The second theme, governing the autonomous agent platform, includes AI context platforms, AI coding agent harnesses, AI agent identity and autonomous exposure remediation. Gartner predicts that organisations prioritising semantics in AI-ready data will improve agentic AI accuracy by up to 80% and cut costs by up to 60%, and that by 2028 a quarter of enterprise security breaches will be linked to AI agent abuse.

The third theme, durable agility, covers SovereignTech, disposable applications that are built to be retired as needs change, and wetware as a service, biological computing explored as a response to future compute and energy limits. Gartner expects more than 75% of organisations outside the United States to adopt digital sovereignty strategies by 2030.

Some of these shifts already show up in survey data. In McKinsey's 2026 survey, 32% of organisations decided against buying software because coding agents let them build it in-house, and IBM's 2026 breach study found that more than 20% of organisations had a breach targeting AI models or applications.

What comes next

• Agent governance, identity and context management are becoming standard requirements in technology selection.
• Sovereignty requirements will shape cloud and data decisions outside the United States.
• AI that reasons over numbers and speech will reach forecasting and customer service first.

What it means for leaders

• Check which of the ten trends touch your 2027 plans, and give each relevant one an owner.
• Invest in shared business definitions and data context before scaling agents.
• Add digital sovereignty to vendor and architecture reviews.