What Gartner has to Say About the ‘Post App Era’

Gartner has just released a report on the top tech predictions and mentioned that the post app era is upon us. We’ve spent all this time talking about how important enterprise mobile apps are to the work place, but according to Gartner, by 2020, the post app age will be in full swing.

What does that mean for enterprise mobile app development now, in 2015?

By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions, and the postapp era will begin to dominate– Smart agent technologies, in the form of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and other agents, will monitor user content and behavior in conjunction with cloud-hosted neural networks to build and maintain data models from which the technology will draw inferences about people, content and contexts. Based on these information-gathering and model-building efforts, VPAs can predict users’ needs, build trust and ultimately act autonomously on the user’s behalf.

The truth is, yes technology like, Siri and Google Now will evolve into into highly functional control centers or VPAs for your device and single function apps, like email and web browsers won’t be used like they are today. HOWEVER this does not negate the need for enterprise mobile apps now. Five years is a very long time in the tech world and the need for these enterprise apps now are very real. If these apps don’t exist before the you adopt VPAs as the primary control for your enterprise mobile devices, it will be much harder for the VPA to adjust to your employee’s corporate lifestyle without a solid foundation to stand on.