Gartner Japan on November 4, 2026, published its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2027, a list organized around three pillars: ‘leverage frontier AI beyond text,’ ‘govern autonomous agent platforms,’ and ‘design for resilient agility.’ Takeshi Ikeda, Vice President and Analyst, said at a press briefing the same day that the list is not a shopping list of products to introduce next year but material for considering their positioning in corporate strategy.
Last year’s edition emphasized what AI makes possible, highlighting items such as ‘physical AI’ that perceives and acts in real space in real time. By contrast, the 2027 list allocates four of its ten items to governing autonomous agents and three to designing change-resilient foundations; that allocation itself reflects a corporate shift from ‘what is possible’ to ‘how to control it.’
Gartner 2027 Tech Trends — Beyond text
The first pillar groups three technologies meant to extend AI beyond text: large quantitative models (LQM), voice inference models, and world models. Each is presented as a way to compensate for weaknesses in large language models.
Large quantitative models (LQM) embed numerical computation and calculations based on physical laws inside a neural network rather than relying solely on next-token prediction. Gartner describes LQM as incorporating analytical methods to pursue both computational efficiency and explainability. Ikeda said the work organizations want computers to handle is not limited to conversation and framed a goal of evolving toward ‘smart and trustworthy AI’ that incorporates mathematical models from financial engineering and control systems. He expects widespread adoption in five to eight years.
Voice inference models are presented as the closest to practical use, with a target horizon of one to three years. Unlike systems that transcribe voice to text, these models learn and infer directly from voice and respond in voice, retaining information such as emotion and pacing lost in transcription. Gartner notes that capability could enable judgments that grasp a speaker’s intent and even anticipate next actions; use cases cited include call centers and dialogue involving complex judgments in medical care and education. Gartner predicts that more than 70% of enterprise voice interactions will be handled autonomously by voice models by 2030; as of 2026 that figure remains below 10%.
World models are positioned as a technology more than five years out. They provide AI with preconditions of the world in advance — for example the composition of three-dimensional space and physical laws — reducing the need to infer everything from scratch. Ikeda said that running AI in environments with limited conditions will enable safe, low-cost verification of physical AI and business strategy.
