Download the Gartner® Hype CycleTM for Manufacturing Operations Strategy, 2025 for a view of innovative concepts and emerging technologies, including Industrial Data Management and Agentic AI.
Economic volatility, rapid technology innovations and supply disruption risks are reshaping manufacturing strategies.
We’ve found that the Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Operations Strategy helps organizations cut through the noise and make informed decisions for sustained cost optimization and competitive advantage. It’s considered a critical decision support tool for operations leaders, providing a structured framework for evaluating the adoption rates and business impacts of current technologies and business disciplines. This helps prioritize initiatives that align with both immediate operational needs and long-term strategic objectives.
Leverage the model in this report to learn about the maturity, business impact, obstacles, and user recommendations for emerging technologies like Industrial Data Management.
In this report, Gartner defines Industrial Data Management as the process of tagging and classifying, normalizing, contextualizing and transforming data generated into industrial data objects. We feel these activities are fundamental to an organization’s ability to collect, store, and use industrial data for initiatives like process performance improvement, scaling IoT use cases, AI implementation, smart manufacturing, and more.
Gartner views Industrial Data Management as an “Emerging” market with a “Transformational” benefit rating and names HighByte as a Sample Vendor.
Automation and AI investments are accelerating. Industrial data management is becoming foundational, enabling manufacturing data spaces and industry cloud platforms, as integration and utilization of production data remain key challenges.
Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.
Innovation Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology's broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
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Gartner Reports: Gartner, Gartner, Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Operations Strategy, Simon Jacobson, Jake Cunningham, Sam New, Chris Campbell, 17 July 2025
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.