Sometimes technology is a cruel mistress who creates ever-changing expectations for humanity, but the folks at Gartner have done their best to answer the question, “What’s coming?” We at Smartlands tend to agree that their predictions for the next five years do reflect some of the new challenges that will come with the new times: mobile-centered cryptocurrency, AI/ML hyper oversight, blockchain to counter deepfake technology, and an Internet of Behavior are all among Gartner’s predictions for the near future. Augmentations, decisions, emotions, and companionship are the four main aspects that, in our opinion, are creating a new reality for how people use technology.
Disclaimer: The Gartner material referenced in this article was originally published in 2019. The related predictions and commentary published by Smartlands also date from 2019 and reflected the information, expectations, and technology trends available at that time. They should not be interpreted as current Gartner forecasts or present-day Smartlands projections. The 2026 assessments have been added retrospectively to evaluate how those predictions developed in practice.
Prediction 1. By 2023, the number of employed disabled people will triple due to AI and emerging technologies that reduce barriers to access.
Emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and others are making work more accessible for employees with disabilities. For example, select foodservice companies are starting to test AI robotics technology that enables paralyzed employees to interact with robotic waiters remotely. Organizations that proactively employ people with disabilities will not only nurture empathy in their communities, but also see 89% higher retention rates, a 72% increase in employee productivity, and a 29% increase in profitability.
July 2026 Verdict: Right direction, wrong altitude.
This one had its heart in the right place and its calculator somewhere in orbit. Employment among disabled workers did not triple by 2023, but the trend moved hard in the predicted direction. Remote work, AI tools, speech-to-text, real-time captioning, better screen readers, and more flexible workplace models did help knock down barriers that had kept many disabled people outside the labor market.
The catch is that technology did not simply ride in on a white horse. AI also brought its own little box of knives: automated CV screening, video interviews, algorithmic scoring, and other HR machinery that can quietly punish non-standard speech, career gaps, neurodivergence, or anything that fails to look like the machine’s idea of “normal.”
So the prediction aged well as a social and technological signal. The door opened wider, but it did not fly off its hinges.
Prediction 2: By 2024, AI identification of emotions will influence more than half of online advertisements.
Artificial emotional intelligence (AEI) is the next area of AI development, especially for companies hoping to detect emotions to influence buying decisions. 28% of marketers ranked AI and machine learning (ML) among the top three technologies that will drive future marketing impact, and 87% of marketing organizations are currently pursuing some level of personalization. Computer vision, which enables AI to identify and interpret physical environments, is a key technology for emotion recognition and is recognized as one of the most important technologies over the next three to five years.
July 2026 Verdict: Missed — and probably for the better.
In 2019, emotion recognition looked like the next creepy superpower in advertising: cameras reading your face, software guessing your mood, brands timing their pitch for the exact second your soul looked vulnerable. A marketer’s dream, in other words, and a civil-liberties lawyer’s nightmare.
By 2026, that vision had not taken over online advertising. The tech exists, but the world isn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet. Regulation, privacy anxiety, biometric restrictions, weak consumer trust, and the general horror of being emotionally strip-mined by ad platforms are slowing the whole thing down.
Emotion AI did not disappear. It moved into narrower lanes: driver monitoring, customer service analytics, safety systems, some healthcare-adjacent use cases, but mainstream programmatic advertising did not become a giant mood-reading casino.
The prediction understood where the industry was headed. It underestimated how many people would look at that future and say, “absolutely not.”
Prediction 3: Through 2023, 30% of IT organizations will extend BYOD policies with “bring your own enhancement” (BYOE) to address augmented humans in the workforce.
An augmented worker is one that uses wearable technology. Wearables are improving workplace productivity and safety across verticals such as automotive, oil and gas, retail and healthcare.
July 2026 Verdict: The future kept its headset in the drawer.
“Bring Your Own Enhancement” sounded cyberpunk wonderfully in 2019: workers arriving with wearables, implants, AR gear, sensor kits, maybe a productivity exoskeleton if HR approved the vibes. In practice, the office revolution remained much more boring and much more durable: laptops, phones, tablets, and the eternal tyranny of BYOD.
Wearables did find real uses, especially in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and safety-heavy environments. AR headsets can help technicians. Sensors can reduce risk. Smart gear can make some workflows faster or safer. But this never became a standard enterprise policy category on the scale predicted.
The reasons are not mysterious. Hardware is expensive. Privacy is radioactive. Biometric data makes lawyers sweat. IT teams were already fighting shadow apps, unsecured phones, and employees connecting to corporate systems via mystery devices. Adding body-adjacent tech to that mess had a major incident report written all over it.
BYOD won because it was useful. BYOE stayed niche because it was complicated.
Prediction 4: By 2024, the World Health Organization will identify online shopping as an addictive disorder, as millions abuse digital commerce and encounter financial stress.
Consumer spending via digital commerce platforms will continue to grow over 10% year over year through 2022. The ease of online shopping will cause financial stress for millions of people, as online retailers increasingly use AI and personalization to effectively target consumers and prompt them to spend discretionary income that they do not have. The resulting debt and personal bankruptcies will cause depression and other health concerns caused by stress, which is capturing the attention of the WHO.
July 2026 Verdict: Close enough to sting, but not clean enough to call perfect.
The original prediction envisioned online shopping crossing the line into medical territory. That basic instinct has aged well — compulsive buying is no longer easy to dismiss as “someone likes packages too much.” The behavior can wreck finances, relationships, mental health, and daily life. Add frictionless checkout, one-click payments, algorithmic nudges, buy-now-pay-later products, and apps that treat boredom like a sales funnel, and the whole thing starts to look less like shopping and more like a slot machine wearing a cardigan.
The nuance matters, though. The medical framing did not arrive as a neat declaration that “online shopping addiction” is now its own global disorder in the exact way the prediction suggested. The reality is more tangled: impulse-control language, compulsive buying-shopping disorder, clinical debate, and digital commerce acting as an accelerant rather than the whole diagnosis.
So yes, the prediction caught a real pathology. It just labeled the beast a little too cleanly.
Prediction 5: By 2023, a self-regulating association for the oversight of AI and machine learning designers will be established in at least four G7 countries.
When algorithms malfunction, the public will demand protection, creating pressure for more regulation. The immediate impact of regulation will be to increase cycle times for AI and ML algorithm development and deployment. Otherwise, the enterprise can expect increased spending on training and certification for practitioners, process documentation, and higher salaries for certified personnel.
July 2026 Verdict: Right pressure, different machinery.
This prediction got the mood of the decade exactly right: AI was never going to scale quietly. Once algorithms started deciding, ranking, generating, filtering, profiling, approving, rejecting, and hallucinating at industrial speed, the demand for oversight was inevitable. The public did not want “trust us” from the same industry that had already made social media feel like a burning nightclub.
What emerged, however, was not a tidy self-regulating guild of AI designers. It became bigger, messier, and more political. The G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, codes of conduct, risk frameworks, provenance rules, model-transparency expectations, and government-industry negotiations turned AI oversight into a diplomatic traffic jam — slow, necessary, and already honking.
Prediction 6: By 2023, 40% of professional workers will orchestrate their business application experiences and capabilities like they do their music streaming experience.
People want to work in places that feel more like their home environment, so self-service applications will be assembled to meet professional and personal requirements. The consumerization of technology and the introduction of new applications have elevated employees’ expectations for what is possible from their business applications. For example, mobile and cloud technologies are freeing many workers from coming into an office, supporting a ‘work anywhere’ environment, and outpacing traditional business models. As humans customize their streaming experience, they can interact more effectively through new application experiences.
July 2026 Verdict: Nailed the behavior, even if the metaphor aged strangely.
This one landed. Not because office workers literally started treating Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, Power BI, and internal dashboards like a Spotify queue (though some workflows now look exactly that deranged), but because the deeper point came true. Work software became modular, self-service, and increasingly assembled by the people doing the work.
Low-code and no-code platforms pushed application-building out of the IT basement and birthed a “citizen developer” — the corporate world’s semi-official workaround: not quite an engineer, not quite a normal employee, often the person quietly holding the whole business process together with automations and duct tape.
The upside is speed. The downside is governance. When everyone can build their own tools, everyone can also build their own security problem.
Still, the prediction clearly saw the shift: work apps stopped being fixed furniture. They became a messy, customizable cockpit.
Prediction 7: By 2023, up to 30% of world news and video content will be authenticated as real by blockchain countering deepfake technology.
Fake news is deliberate disinformation, such as propaganda presented to viewers as real news. Its rapid proliferation in recent years can be attributed to bot-controlled social media accounts, which attract more viewers than authentic news and manipulate human information intake.
By 2021, at least 10 major news organizations will use blockchain to track and prove the authenticity of their published content to readers and consumers. Likewise, governments, technology giants and other entities are fighting back through industry groups and proposed regulations.
July 2026 Verdict: Right problem, wrong holy object.
The prediction saw the monster coming. Deepfakes, synthetic media, forged footage, AI-generated images, and industrial-scale misinformation did become a digital trust crisis. The part that aged less gracefully was the assumption that blockchain would be the hero riding into town.
The actual solution moved in a more practical direction: cryptographic provenance, C2PA standards, content credentials, signed metadata, camera-level authentication, and public-key infrastructure. Less “decentralized revolution,” more “make the file carry its own passport.” Not as sexy on a conference slide, but far more likely to survive contact with real newsrooms, hardware makers, editing software, and distribution platforms.
This is the kind of failed prediction that is more interesting than a simple miss. It identified the disease almost perfectly. It just prescribed the medicine that every 2019 tech deck was legally required to mention.
Blockchain did not become the universal notary of reality. Cryptographic provenance picked up the wrench and got to work.
Prediction 8: Through 2021, digital transformation initiatives will take large traditional enterprises on average twice as long and cost twice as much as anticipated.
Business leaders’ expectations for revenue growth are unlikely to be met through digital optimization strategies due to the costs of technology modernization and the unanticipated costs of simplifying operational interdependencies. Such operational complexity also impedes the pace of change and the degree of innovation and adaptability required to operate as a digital business.
July 2026 Verdict: Painfully, almost boringly true.
This prediction did not need glitter. It needed a procurement spreadsheet and a stiff drink.
Digital transformation did exactly what large enterprise projects so often do: it ballooned, stalled, overran, underdelivered, and then got rebranded before anyone could admit what happened. The technology was rarely the only villain. The real fight was legacy infrastructure, siloed data, nervous leadership, confused incentives, internal politics, change fatigue, and the quiet horror of discovering that “digital transformation” often means rebuilding how the company actually works.
The forecast understood that modernization is not a software purchase. It is organizational surgery. And most companies entered the operating room with a glossy deck, a heroic timeline, and no appetite for pain.
The good news is that successful transformation can still deliver real savings and speed. The bad news is that getting there is less like installing an app and more like rewiring an aircraft mid-flight while half the passengers argue about the budget.
Prediction 9: By 2023, individual activities will be tracked digitally by the Internet of Behavior (Internet of Beings) to influence eligibility for benefits and services for 40% of people worldwide.
Through facial recognition, location tracking and big data, organizations are starting to monitor individual behavior and link that behavior to other digital actions, like buying a train ticket. The Internet of Things (IoT) – where physical things are directed to perform a specific action based on observed operating parameters relative to the desired set of operating parameters — is now being extended to people, known as the Internet of Behavior (IoB).
July 2026 Verdict: The name flopped. The machinery won.
“Internet of Behavior” never became a phrase normal people used, which is probably just as well. It sounds like a Davos panel trying to describe stalking without ruining the lunch. But the thing itself? Very real.
Location data, purchase history, app usage, social feeds, loyalty programs, recommendation engines, connected devices, mobility patterns, credit scoring, ad targeting, dynamic pricing, fraud detection, workplace analytics — the behavioral layer is everywhere. It watches, scores, predicts, nudges, rewards, blocks, and occasionally pretends it is just improving your experience.
The prediction was right that behavioral data would become a major operating system for modern life. It was wrong only if you expected the label to matter. Nobody needed to call it IoB for it to happen. Platforms simply folded the logic into personalization, risk assessment, customer analytics, and eligibility decisions.
So yes, the Internet of Behavior arrived. It just came wearing a hundred more boring names.
Prediction 10: By 2025, 50% of people with a smartphone but without a bank account will use a mobile-accessible cryptocurrency account.
Major online marketplaces and social media platforms will begin to support cryptocurrency payments by the end of 2020. Mobile-enabled cryptocurrency account services like Smartee are already serving unbanked citizens in some major jurisdictions, and by 2025, decentralized global digital platforms will bypass banking conglomerates and fully meet the global public’s crypto needs.
July 2026 Verdict: Half right, half moonshot.
The 2019 crypto optimism is very visible here: give the unbanked a smartphone, add a mobile wallet, bypass the banks, and watch the old financial order crumble like wet cardboard. Reality, as usual, had other plans.
The 50% figure did not happen. Crypto did not onboard half the world’s unbanked by 2025. Volatility, scams, regulation, user experience, cash-in/cash-out problems, trust gaps, and plain old complexity kept mass adoption well below that heroic target.
But the prediction was not stupid. In emerging markets, especially where inflation bites hard and banking access is weak, crypto and stablecoins did become genuinely useful. Not always as a glorious decentralized alternative to the banking system, but as payment rails, remittance tools, dollar exposure, savings workarounds, and financial escape hatches.
The real winner was not the old Bitcoin fantasy of replacing money overnight. It was the quieter, more practical rise of mobile wallets and stablecoins.
So the forecast missed the scale. But it understood the pressure: when traditional finance leaves people outside the building, they will look for another door.
