By Ashu Goel, CEO at WinWire
The tech industry is constantly evolving. It has to. The ability to pivot quickly and make strategic adjustments is crucial for success. In fact, 40% of tech founders say that pivoting is essential to preventing failure. As the needs of their customers change, tech organizations must also change to meet those needs quickly and efficiently.
How do they do that? They don’t trail the trends; they make them. By embracing an agile mindset, companies not only survive but also gain a competitive edge that positions them for long-term growth and prosperity.
So, where will tech go in the coming year? Here are seven trends that will shape the industry in 2024.
1: Generative AI will change the UI/UX paradigm
In the coming years, generative AI will reshape the user experience, bringing a significant shift in how individuals interact with technology. The rising Millennial and Gen Z workforce will play a pivotal role in driving this transformation, which will be characterized by natural language processing and voice-based interactions with technology.
This shift is the beginning of a broader transformation that will bring many benefits. One benefit will be a considerable reduction in the time required for training individuals on enterprise applications. The intuitive nature of voice-based interfaces will allow the new workforce to engage with enterprise apps as effortlessly as with consumer applications like Snapchat and Spotify.
Imagine a sales team that relies on an ERP system to manage their sales data, customer interactions, and inventory. Navigating through the system’s complex interfaces and commands can be incredibly challenging for new employees. But, with the integration of a voice-based interface into the ERP system, the user experience improves dramatically. For instance, a salesperson could verbally request and receive information about recent sales trends in a particular region or ask for inventory levels of specific products without learning all the system’s ins and outs.
2: 2024 will bring a surge in automation and data optimization across organizations
As we move into 2024, organizations are poised to intensify their efforts to automate processes that consume significant time and resources, emphasizing not just automation but optimization. Whether expediting infrastructure setup or streamlining supply chain operations, the focus is on achieving more with less, leveraging time and resources effectively.
However, this optimization wave will require better data quality. Generative AI has underscored the critical need for high-quality data, and, in response, organizations are working to elevate their data quality and make it more robust and productive. To do that, they must be able to store data more efficiently and process it more effectively.
Take an e-commerce company that has automated many aspects of its operations, but still faces inefficiencies due to a lack of high-quality data. As a result, the company often faces discrepancies in stock levels, leading to stockouts. Or its customer service chatbots sometimes provided inaccurate responses due to incomplete or incorrect data inputs. However, by improving its data collection and cleansing methods, the company can start to improve its overall operations, leading to better decision making and happier customers.
In the coming year, there will be a substantial emphasis on data quality, ensuring that organizations can harness the full potential of their data assets. Chief data officers and CIOs will spend much of next year making sure their overall data estate is much more mature than it is now.
3: 2024 will mark the start of a paradigm shift in data integration
Over the past decade, data integration has been a hot topic in technology circles. Organizations have been tirelessly working to integrate data from various systems, whether it comes from an ERP system like SAP or any other platform within the enterprise. However, as we look ahead, this integration mindset is set to evolve.
Specifically, organizations will begin to question how much integration is really necessary, as opposed to letting data reside in its native systems. A new extraction layer will emerge in the coming year, alleviating the need to track where data resides obsessively. This shift promises to offer a more streamlined and efficient approach to data utilization, changing the way organizations handle and process data going forward.
4: AIOps will revolutionize IT with a focus on monitoring and management
A pressing question for all enterprise organizations is how best to manage an increasingly intricate IT ecosystem. While platform vendors are introducing tools to address this, there will be a need for policy changes, updated procedures, and the development of specialized expertise to sustain and manage these systems over the long term.
One emerging solution is AIOps-artificial intelligence for IT operations-which promises to redefine the traditional approach to IT. AIOps shares common elements with DevOps, particularly a focus on agile development, but it places a greater emphasis on monitoring. The technology is rapidly gaining prominence for its effective monitoring and management of the entire IT operating environment, ensuring high accuracy and exceptional performance.
Picture a large metropolitan hospital that uses AIOps to monitor its IT operations. AIOps can anticipate a potential issue with a critical piece of diagnostic equipment, such as an MRI machine, and then help to quickly resolve the problem, ensuring a higher level of patient care.
In the years to come, AIOps will be a transformative force in the IT industry, influencing the way organizations approach and manage their IT environments.
5: AI-driven disruption will be a big opportunity for boutique IT services firms
With the advent of new technologies like generative AI, there will be a huge opportunity for boutique firms in the IT services industry to disrupt larger organizations. There is truly a chance to upend the large IT services providers, many of which are trying to protect their turf by maintaining billing cycles without embracing groundbreaking innovations.
For boutique IT services firms, the key to success lies in staying at the forefront of emerging technologies like generative AI-even though there may not be a lot of revenue in the short term. In the long term, there will be. Already, by the end of next year, we’ll start to see a separation between those organizations that use AI to their advantage and those that get disrupted.
6: The Rise of Coherent Cloud Data Ecosystems
According to recent research, 55% of companies still have a primarily manual approach to discovering data within their enterprise, and only 28% have a strategy to take advantage of it. 81% of organizations lack an enterprise data strategy to capitalize on their data assets fully. However, according to Gartner, by 2024, half of all new cloud system deployments will be based on a coherent cloud data ecosystem rather than manually connected point solutions.
7: AI-Powered Code Generation
Developers will benefit from Microsoft Copilot’s advanced AI capabilities. It will become an indispensable tool for coding, assisting developers in writing high-quality, efficient code across programming languages. This will significantly accelerate software development cycles.
Final takeaway
2024 will be a year for companies to reassess and make strategic adjustments to stay competitive in the market. Those that adapt to changing market conditions and embrace emerging technologies like generative AI will be the ones that remain relevant and vibrant in the years ahead.
In conclusion, 2024 promises a seismic shift in the business landscape, and as leaders, it’s not enough to ride the wave of disruption; we must ride it with purpose and precision. These seven transformative trends are more than mere shifts; they are the pillars of a tech revolution.
So, let us embrace them with an agile mindset, not as mere observers but as architects of change. We hold the power to redefine user experiences, optimize data for efficiency, reimagine data integration, revolutionize IT management, and leverage AI for innovation.