A visitor seen looking at the Multimedia project Data Flux by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, Feb 1, 2019.

A visitor seen looking at the Multimedia project Data Flux by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens, Feb 1, 2019. Photo: Nikolas Joao Kokovlis/Zuma Press

Blockchain, the digital ledger underlying bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has dropped to the bottom of Gartner Inc.’s annual list of the most disruptive data and analytics capabilities for enterprise IT – replaced by tools that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“It will be several years before four or five major blockchain technologies become dominant,” the IT research firm said in a report Monday.

Three years ago, Gartner said blockchain was “near the peak” of its hype cycle for emerging tech, describing it as a distributed database poised to have a “transformational impact on business” within the next five to 10 years.

World Economic Forum, also in 2016, included blockchain in its top ten emerging technologies.

Last year, the value of cryptocurrencies – which rely on blockchain to provide an secure, encrypted ecosystem over computing networks – lost more than 80% of their market value, raising some doubts over the future of digital ledger technologies.

By contrast, data and analytics tools continue to evolve, from “supporting internal decision making to continuous intelligence, information products and appointing chief data officers,” Gartner said in the report, released at its annual data and analytics summit in Sydney.

It identified augmented analytics, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to better develop, consume and share data, as the number one analytics trend.

Augmented analytics automates the process of parsing company data, cleaning it up and converting it into insights in a way that company officials outside of internal tech teams can understand -- a big benefit given heated competition on the recruiting front for data scientists.

Augmented analytics “will be a dominant driver of new purchases of analytics and business intelligence” by 2020, Gartner said. It advised corporate data and analytics leaders to “plan to adopt augmented analytics as platform capabilities mature.”

Other capabilities cited as leading trends in enterprise IT in the years ahead include:

Augmented data management, a process that leverages AI and machine learning to automate the complex task of managing data quality or integration, enabling non-data scientists to be more autonomous with their use of data.

Continuous intelligence, a design pattern in which real-time analytics are “integrated within a business operation.

Explainable AI, a tool that auto-generates explanation for how an advanced AI model reached a specific recommendation.

Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said these and other tools are part of a broader challenge for companies created by digital disruption – that is, too much data, he said.

“The amount of data is growing quickly and the urgency of transforming data into value in real-time is growing at an equally rapid pace,” Mr. Feinberg said in a statement from the event in Sydney.

“New serve workloads are demanding not just fast CPU performance, but massive memory and faster storage,” he said.

Gartner projects worldwide spending on IT to reach $3.8 trillion this year, up 3.2% from 2018, driven by an ongoing shift in corporate IT budgets into cloud services and away from on-premise data centers.

Forrest Research, in a separate report last month, saiddigital technology is playing an increasingly central role in the success of companies across a range of industries, led by “more powerful and fluid IT capabilities.”