With the arrival of a new year, it’s interesting to analyze which new technology trends will define the way we live and work.
Forbes has made a list of the 5 technological trends for 2024. In the same vein, consultancy firm Gartner, which produces an annual report on technology trends for the following year, has already released its 2024 report.
We decided to bring you the translation of these two articles!
Generative AI - Everyday automation
2023 was the year that generative AI became popular. 2024 will be the year that the world understands how truly powerful and useful it can be. Today, if you’re not a technology expert, the phrase artificial intelligence (AI) can cause a shiver of fear – if you’re not worried about it taking over the world or destroying the human race, you might be waiting nervously for it to steal your job and make you redundant.
But as generative AI finds its way into more and more of the applications we use every day, from search engines to office software, design packages and communication tools, people are realizing its potential. Used correctly, it’s like having a super-intelligent personal assistant available 24/7, making us more efficient, faster and more productive.
More importantly, by handing over our day-to-day intellectual work – gathering information, scheduling, managing compliance, organizing ideas, structuring projects – to AIs, we will have more time to leverage our truly human skills. We will spend more time being creative, exploring new ideas and original thinking, or communicating with humans rather than programming machines. The genie is out of the bottle and, although there are undeniable challenges around ethics and regulation that still need to be resolved, I believe that 2024 will be the year when everyone begins to understand how transformative generative AI will be for our lives.
Phygital convergence
The real and the digital are becoming increasingly intertwined. Technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and the immersive Internet are breaking down barriers between the physical world and the digital realms where we spend more and more of our time. More than ever, we exist as digital avatars in virtual environments. This applies to work, where we collaborate remotely via platforms such as Zoom, Teams and Slack, and to play, where online games and e-sports are more popular than ever. We use social apps like TikTok and Instagram to create virtual spaces in which we share moments from our “real” lives – selected and filtered to create digital personalities that become our virtual selves.
Across all sectors, we see this concept emerging in the form of the digital twin – a virtual representation of a real-world object, system or process. This can be as simple as an individual component or as complex as an entire city or even an ecosystem. Importantly, the digital twin is built from data captured from its real-world counterpart. Advances in the science of genomics mean that we can break down the fundamental essence of life into digital code, which can then be manipulated and reconstructed in the real world in order to create new medicines and eradicate diseases.
In 2024, we will continue to see less and less distinction between the real world and the virtual world. This means that the digital is becoming more and more realistic and the real is becoming as flexible and malleable as the digital.
Sustainable Technology
Sustainable technology will continue to take center stage during 2024, as countries and companies continue to work towards meeting net-zero emissions commitments. At the same time, individuals will increasingly take advantage of technology to minimize their personal impact on the environment.
Sustainable technology includes greener ways of doing things that we already do – such as electric cars, bicycles and public transport, which will continue to increase their market share in 2024. It also includes new solutions to environmental problems, such as carbon capture and storage, as well as green and renewable energy technologies. The circular economy will become an increasingly important concept, as durability, recyclability and reuse are incorporated directly into products at the design stage. And the tech world will further embrace ideas such as green cloud computing, where infrastructures and services prioritize reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, and sustainable applications – software tools designed to help us live in a greener way.
The challenges facing developers and users of sustainable technology during 2024 will include the need to develop ethical and sustainable methods for obtaining and extracting the materials needed to manufacture devices, infrastructure demands created by changing consumer habits, such as the adoption of electric vehicles, and potential disparities between different geographical or socio-economic groups in their ability to access green alternatives. We will also become increasingly alert to the presence of greenwashing – superficial efforts aimed solely at generating positive PR around a particular technology.
Cyber resilience
Research suggests that one in two companies has been the victim of a successful cyber attack in the last three years, and the cost of these attacks to industry is expected to grow to more than 10 billion dollars by the end of 2024. Faced with this growing threat, technological solutions designed to strengthen defences and give us a fighting chance are at the top of every organization’s must-have list.
However, cyber resilience goes beyond cyber security, as it also encompasses measures that can be taken to recover and ensure continuity when defenses are breached or by circumstances beyond our control. This could mean implementing remote working procedures to ensure that companies can function when employees can’t get to central locations – a technological solution that traditionally can’t be considered an element of cyber security.
The automation of cyber defense through AI and machine learning, integrated frameworks that merge security measures with continuity protocols and awareness of social factors, from social engineering attacks to public relations firefighting, are all essential elements of any cyber resilience strategy.
Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and the competition to bring new solutions to market that take advantage of innovative technologies such as AI is intensifying. This ensures that cyber resilience will become an increasingly prominent trend throughout 2024 in businesses and consumer technology.
Quantum computing
There has been a growing buzz around quantum computing for some time and I believe that 2024 will mark the year when it should make the transition to tangible benefits. Quantum computers are capable of performing a large number of calculations simultaneously, taking advantage of strange and wonderful elements of quantum physics, such as entanglement and quantum superposition. This allows them to operate using quantum bits (qubits) that can exist in several states simultaneously, rather than a 1 or 0 state, like traditional computer bits.
Early investors in quantum technology include banks and financial services organizations hoping to increase the power of AI systems developed in recent years for fraud detection, risk management and high-frequency trading.
Quantum computing won’t speed up all the jobs we use computers for, but by 2024, I think we’ll start to see benefits as it’s applied to various fields of heavy computing, including drug discovery, genome sequencing, cryptography, meteorology, materials science, optimization of complex systems such as traffic flow in big cities and even the search for extraterrestrial life.
These are all fields that have enormous potential to solve the challenges we and our planet face, and I am very excited to discover what advances will be made with the help of quantum computing in the near future.
Gartner
Each of the trends relates to one or more key business themes: protecting and preserving past and future investments, building the right solutions for the right stakeholders at the right time and adding value to the changing environment of internal and external customers.
Theme 1: Protect your investment
To ensure the sustained impact of your investments in technology, be:
- Intentional: stop all uncontrolled experimentation with insufficient direction. Efforts must be intentional and produce solid results for daily use.
- Realistic: calculate the ROI (return on investment) of projects considering the necessary protection measures from the outset.
- Attentive to the future: adapt innovations with reuse in mind, while guaranteeing your rights (i.e. intellectual property and ownership of creations) and a lasting position in the future.
The IT trends that fall into this category are:
- AI trust, risk and safety management (AI TRiSM)
- Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
- Industry cloud platforms
- Sustainable Technology
- Democratized generative AI
By 2026, generative AI will significantly alter 70% of the design and development effort for new web and mobile applications.
source: Gartner
Theme 2: Rise of the builders
Unleash the creative powers of the countless communities that create applications and solutions:
- Using technology suited to your sector, specific organizational needs and specialized workers.
- Developing your script to allow non-experts to create.
- Working in collaboration with stakeholders to determine software delivery and portfolio lifecycle management.
The IT trends that fall under this heading are:
- Platform Engineering
- AI-enhanced development
- Industry cloud platforms
- Smart Apps
- Sustainable Technology
- Democratized generative AI
By 2027, 80% of CIOs (Chief Information Officers) will have performance metrics linked to the sustainability of the IT organization.
source: Gartner
Theme 3: Deliver the value
Refine and accelerate the way you improve the experience for stakeholders and expand your options for generating revenue:
- Continuously adjusting to the changing demands of internal and external customers to create a virtuous cycle of determination and value delivery.
- Include approaches for algorithm-based clients, whose influence is growing rapidly.
- Facilitating controlled access to rapidly evolving digital tools, whether related to generative AI, workforce qualification and migration or other augmentation and automation opportunities.
The IT trends that fall under this heading are:
- Robot customers
- Increased and connected workforce
- Smart Apps
- Sustainable Technology
- Democratized generative AI
From the desk of Bart Willemsen, Vice President Analyst at Gartner "Technological disruptions and socio-economic uncertainties require a willingness to act boldly and strategically increase resilience, rather than relying on ad hoc responses. IT leaders must ensure calculated risks and make reliable and durable investments to sustainably enable internal and external value creation. "
How to use these technologies to achieve your CEO's and CIO's goals for 2024 and beyond:
- Examine the potential of trends in relation to your organization’s specific situation, include them in your strategic planning for the coming years and adjust your business models and operations accordingly.
- Trends reinforce each other, they are not isolated occurrences. Combine technologies to suit your strategy, transformation intentions and benefits.
- Positive results include increasing resilience, maximizing the value of data, attracting and retaining talent, meeting ESG objectives, promoting growth and accelerating digital business.
