From the white paper Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 by Kasey Panetta:
The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology trends highlight changing or not yet widely recognized trends that will impact and transform industries through 2023.
Whether it’s cars, robots or agriculture, autonomous things use AI to perform tasks traditionally done by humans. The sophistication of the intelligence varies, but all autonomous things use AI to interact more naturally with their environments.
Autonomous things exist across five types:
- Robotics
- Vehicles
- Drones
- Appliances
- Agents
Those five types occupy four environments: Sea, land, air and digital. They all operate with varying degrees of capability, coordination and intelligence. For example, they can span a drone operated in the air with human-assistance to a farming robot operating completely autonomously in a field. This paints a broad picture of potential applications, and virtually every application, service and IoT object will incorporate some form of AI to automate or augment processes or human actions. Collaborative autonomous things such as drone swarms will increasingly drive the future of AI systems
Explore the possibilities of AI-driven autonomous capabilities in any physical object in your organization or customer environment, but keep in mind these devices are best used for narrowly defined purposes. They do not have the same capability as a human brain for decision making, intelligence or general-purpose learning.