The business landscape today is characterized by rapid change. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) have given enterprises the capabilities to solve market challenges and achieve measurable outcomes – while simultaneously driving efficiencies and cost savings.
However, the proliferation of technologies and tools can make it difficult for enterprises to know which solutions they should pay attention to and invest and investing in for the best competitive advantage.
Going into 2024 and beyond, these are the emerging technology trends organizations across varying industries, focus areas, and skill sets should be prioritizing:
Creating Business Value With Generative AI
Generative AI has been gaining momentum as an important business enabler in the last 12 months. It has, says the World Economic Forum, provided capabilities that leverage the power of data to respond to changing environments rapidly.
Even as more sectors and businesses have begun to realize the business benefits of AI and invest in its capabilities, the technology has continued to evolve and take massive strides forward. It marked a major milestone in 2023, when generative AI tools were launched and adopted by organizations at both speed and scale.
What does this mean in 2024?
- Generative AI Will Enable More Rapid Digital Transformation: According to a Gartner report on the Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2024 and Beyond, generative AI now lies at the heart of strategic decision-making and guides executives’ way of thinking to create more future-ready, agile organizations. Generative AI tools are predicted to reduce modernization costs by 70% by 2027 by creating relevant replacements for legacy applications.
- Generative AI Will Help Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences: Generative AI tools will further give businesses the opportunity to merge the human with digital and build more meaningful customer relationships. Research by Accenture has found the large language models used by generative AI are helping craft intelligent, two-way conversations that are the foundation of the customer care, support, and experiences that today’s consumers demand.
The opportunity to deliver business value is clear – especially as use cases expand across industries. For example, the aviation and airline industry has seen firsthand how generative AI has been able to redefine the people experience – for passengers and employees alike – and streamline back-office processes for greater resiliency, and drive efficiencies that unlock revenue opportunities.
Insurance, and banking and financial services, are other sectors that are seeing the potential of generative AI translate into positive outcomes. The technology’s evolving capabilities are helping reimagine underwriting in insurance, making claims processing and management more seamless, and enhancing customer service. In financial services, this technology can streamline customer onboarding, customize advice, and mitigate risk and fraud by detecting patterns in data.
It is these advances in generative AI that are the reason why 40 percent of respondents in a McKinsey Global Survey say their organizations will increase their overall investment in AI.
A large part of that investment will include intelligent automation, which helps businesses improve and streamline complex business processes for better return on investment (ROI).
Delivering Guaranteed Outcome-Driven Results With Intelligent Automation
Modern businesses are increasingly turning to the power of automation to reduce operational costs and enhance customer satisfaction. Simple robotic process automation (RPA) to improve the speed and accuracy of repetitive business processes is no longer enough, however.
Going into 2024, organizations are going to have to automate more complex processes and tasks for better resource and KPI planning, as well as enabling and facilitating more sophisticated functions such as discovery, analysis, design, monitoring, and assessment.
Why will intelligent automation be so important for organizations in 2024?
- Investing in Advanced Hyperautomation Platforms Will Help Accelerate End-To-End Process Automation. This improves the quality, speed, accuracy, cost and efficiency of operations and processes, and increases revenue and market share.
- Transformative Automation Will Flourish, Driven by Generative AI Capabilities. Forrester forecasts that physical and cognitive automation will be enhanced by innovation in physical automation and the practical application of large language models in operational enterprise use cases.
Combined with the growing trend of utilizing Business Process as-a-Service (BPaaS) consumption models and platforms, forward-thinking businesses can marry analytics and business intelligence to transform disparate back-office operations into integrated, effective digital workflows across the entire business operation.
Advanced analytics will continue to play a critical role in how businesses maximize the value of automation and generative AI capabilities in transforming their operations.
Relevant insights that enable decision-making is the key to solving business challenges and delivering solutions and results that matter. With the explosion in the volume of data being generated, analytics capabilities that help businesses extract meaning and insights – especially from unstructured data, which is predicted to double for enterprises in 2024 – will become ever more essential.
That’s where the power of the cloud can also help: the agility and scalability that the cloud provides will make it easier for organizations to leverage large amounts of real-time data and generate value from it.
The burgeoning demand for infrastructure that will enable the adoption of as-a-service offerings based on robust insights is a driving force of the ongoing growth of the cloud. It is why cloud migration and transformation will continue apace – with worldwide spending on public cloud services forecast to reach $1.35 trillion by 2027, according to the latest update to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Software and Public Cloud Services Spending Guide.
More organizations are willing to invest in real cloud transformation and digital engineering services for digital transformation that delivers data-driven results, and these are the businesses that are emerging as industry leaders.
Overcoming Technology Risks for Business Results
Even as they continue to adopt and deploy solutions to enable faster and more effective digital transformation, business leaders and boards will need to understand and manage the risks associated with these emerging technologies.
Regulations and governance around AI are becoming more stringent to mitigate risks such as inaccuracies, intellectual property infringements, cybersecurity threats, bias, and privacy, among others.
Executives and boards will need to be proactive about addressing the business risks of AI and emerging technologies, especially around regulatory compliance. To do so effectively to deliver business value and return on investment requires bringing together people, processes, products, and platforms across critical emerging technologies.
The organizations that successfully invest in all of these elements and merging the human with digital to create unique solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes will win in 2024 and beyond.
For help navigating these trends, visit https://www.sutherlandglobal.com/ or get in touch with us at https://www.sutherlandglobal.com/contact-us.
