In early December, Deloitte released “Tech Trends 2024,” its 15th annual report that “chronicles the growing business imperative to balance today’s tactical needs with tomorrow’s strategic ambitions.” The report is focused on six major technology trends that are likely to be critical to business transformation over the next 18-24 months. Let me discuss each of these trends, starting with:
Genie out of the bottle: Generative AI as growth catalyst.
Not surprisingly, generative AI and its potential impact on business and the world is Deloitte’s overriding trend. “Philosophers have long debated whether machines are capable of thought, but generative AI makes the question moot,” said the report. “Regardless of whether it possesses intelligence in the philosophical sense, it does in a practical sense, creating the opportunity for huge productivity and efficiency gains in enterprise settings. Now that machines can behave, comprehend, and narrate like humans, the question becomes how this will impact business and the world broadly.”
Generative AI is a force multiplier for human ambitions, wrote Mike Bechtel, Deloitte’s chief futurist in the report’s introduction. The technology itself, he added, is actually a straightforward evolution of the machine intelligence capabilities Deloitte has been tracking since the Tech Trend’s inception 15 years ago. But, its potential business impact is truly revolutionary. “The newfound opportunity to augment productive professionals with silicon-based intelligence is indeed a generational business opportunity. It’s a full-on paradigm shift that is poised to unlock the doors to altogether-new business opportunities and fundamentally change how the enterprise itself organizes and operates.”
Business leaders should not to simply view the technology as a way to reduce costs by automating and eliminating jobs. “Instead, generative AI should be considered rocket fuel for elevated ambitions,” Bechtel added. “AI (traditional and generative alike) can free up precious human cycles from mundane operations and allow people to focus, finally, on higher-value work that better aligns with tomorrow’s business imperatives — namely, new and improved products, services, experiences, and markets (in other words, the time-tested keys to profitable growth).” Human creativity will matter more than ever. “With generative AI as a force multiplier for imagination, the future belongs to those who ask better questions and have more exciting ideas to amplify.”
In the Fall of 2023 Deloitte and Fortune conducted a CEO Survey. The survey found that companies are starting to adopt generative AI. About 17% of surveyed CEOs are using generative AI in at scale production; one third are using it in limited production; and almost half are experimenting or evaluating the technology. The top reasons cited by CEOs for adopting generative AI are increased efficiencies (96%), automation of manuals tasks (89%), lower operational costs (87%), new ideas and insights (84%), and accelerated innovation (84%).
Deloitte’s Tech Trends report offered some additional considerations based on the experience of businesses that have already implemented the technology. These include: ensure that the data necessary for training AI models is properly architected and accessible; effective governance and guardrails are more important than ever; ensure that AI models have not been trained on copyrighted materials that may present legal risks; implement AI in a series of incremental steps, starting with proof-of-concept projects; and “Don’t become so blinded by the buzz around generative AI that you neglect the five other fundamental forces. Indeed, AI matters more than ever, but this does not mean that everything else you’ve been working on suddenly doesn’t.”
Let me summarize the report’s five other tech trends.
Interfaces in new places: Spatial computing and the industrial metaverse
The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the metaverse and extended reality. In October of 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced his commitment to a metaverse strategy by rebranding Facebook as Meta Platforms. A week or so later, Satya Nadella shared Microsoft’s metaverse plans.
The last major advance in user interfaces took place in the 1980s when text-based interfaces gave way to graphical user Interfaces (GUIs). GUIs were embraced by just about every PC and user device, and GUI-based Web browsers played a major role in the explosive growth of the internet and World Wide Web in the 1990s.
“As the industrial metaverse transforms to enterprise tool, spatial technologies are taking hold in industrial applications, using data and AI to replicate real-life processes,” said Deloitte’s report. “Augmented and virtual reality for consumer applications have garnered a lot of attention, but these technologies are making their biggest impact in industrial settings. Companies are using the industrial metaverse to power things such as digital twins, spatial simulation, augmented work instructions, and collaborative digital spaces that make factories and businesses safer and more efficient. Factory workers, designers, and engineers are benefiting from immersive 3D interaction — through tested devices such as tablets and experimental ones such as smart glasses — in ways that traditional knowledge workers haven’t yet.”
Smarter, not harder: Beyond brute force compute
For the past 50 years, the semi-log graphs associated with Moore’s Law became a visual metaphor for the technology revolution unleashed by the exponential improvements of just about all digital components, from processing speeds and storage capacity to networking bandwidth and pixels. But over the past 10-15 years, we’ve started to adapt to the advent of computing beyond Moore’s Law by moving up-the-stack and relying more in innovations in specialized devices like GPUs, advanced algorithms and systems architectures, software and applications.
“As technology has become a bigger differentiator for enterprises, businesses have built ever-more complex workloads,” notes the Deloitte report. “Typical cloud services still provide more than enough functionality for most business-as-usual operations, but for the cutting-edge use cases that drive competitive advantage, a new need for specialized hardware is emerging. Training AI models, performing complex simulations, and building digital twins of real-world environments require different kinds of computing power. Leading businesses today are finding new ways to get more out of their existing infrastructure and adding cutting-edge hardware to further speed up processes.”
From DevOps to DevEx: Empowering the engineering experience
DevOps is a set of practices, productivity tools, and process improvements that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve and shorten the overall systems development life cycle. However, as technology advances become both increasingly complex and crucial to just about all business, technology talent is more important than ever. As a result, “a new focus is emerging for companies that are dedicated to attracting and retaining the best tech talent: developer experience, or DevEx, a developer-first mindset that aims to improve software engineers’ day-to-day productivity and satisfaction by considering their every touchpoint with the organization.”
“Developers empowered with the right tools, processes, and culture typically perform better.” According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, employees are 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay beyond three years in their jobs if they feel they have the technology that supports them at work. Given that communications and collaborations are fundamental qualities of the employee experience, employers should facilitate their interactions with technology.
Defending reality: Truth in an age of synthetic media
“With the proliferation of AI tools, it’s now easier than ever for bad actors to impersonate and deceive their targets. We’re seeing deepfakes being used to get around voice and facial recognition access controls. They’re also being used in phishing attempts. Security risks are multiplying with every new content-generation tool that hits the internet. However, leading organizations are responding through a mix of policies and technologies designed to identify harmful content and make their employees more aware of the risks.”
According to Deloitte, phishing is the most common type of cyberattack. In 2021, cybercriminals stole over $44 million through phishing attacks. Even though many of these attacks are not all that sophisticated, eventually a few achieve their nefarious goals due to their massive volume, estimated at around 3.4 billion spam emails every day.
Misinformation is another serious problem, especially now that bad actors can use generative AI tools to quickly create large amounts of content instead of having to personally craft messages, allowing them to experiment and test out messages with the public until they find one that resonates. “For little to no cost and with virtually no technical skill, anyone will be able to create convincing media to separate businesses from their money and data.
Core workout: From technical debt to technical wellness
“Over the years, Tech Trends has chronicled the progression of once-cutting- edge technologies as they become legacy systems in dire need of a modernization salvo,” said the Deloitte report about its sixth and final tech trend. “This year, we take a step back to broaden the concept of core systems that need to be modernized. Businesses need to deal with aging networks that can’t keep up with 5G and Wi-Fi. Their data centers are still being shifted to cloud, but data management needs to be cleaned up for generative AI’s primetime. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are pushing out new versions that require significant upgrades. Even relatively recent software-as-a- service (SaaS) implementations that were supposed to be a remedy for years of legacy core woes aren’t aging well. On top of all this, companies are dealing with a mix of contractors, captives, and traditional workers who aren’t ready to pivot to modern engineering.”
“To move forward, leaders can look for a smarter way to invest in modernization: a systematic assessment of their company’s needs, strengths, and budget across the key areas of modernization spending. A holistic view of their organization’s systems, grounded in real business context, can help them eschew ever-growing technical debt for a more long-term view of technical health, one that improves over time and provides more confidence to business and technology teams alike.”
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