Tech Trends 2024: Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees
Released today, Tech Trends 2024, our 15th annual exploration of the impact of emerging technologies, finds business leaders working to balance sparkle and substance to drive outsized business outcomes. Tech Trends highlights the stories of pioneering organizations that are ahead of the curve in using new technologies and approaches that stand to become the norm within 18 to 24 months and projects where these trends could be headed in the coming decade.
Watch the Tech Trends 2024 Video
Generative AI is the tech story of the year, but as someone who’s spent a quarter-century up to my eyeballs in all things newfangled, I want to provide some perspective on the current excitement and frame this breakthrough moment within the context of our six macro technology forces.
First, while generative AI feels unprecedented and revolutionary, the technology itself is a surprisingly straightforward evolution of machine intelligence capabilities that we’ve been tracking and chronicling since Tech Trends’ inception.
But on the business side, the hyperbole is very much warranted. Our silicon colleagues’ star turn from critic to co-creator represents a full-on paradigm shift that’s poised to unlock altogether new business opportunities and fundamentally change how the enterprise itself organizes and operates.
Yes, AI (traditional and generative alike) should be considered rocket fuel for elevated ambitions. It 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: new and improved products, services, experiences, and markets.
But over focusing on any single technology risks failing to see the forest for the trees. AI matters more than ever, but this does not mean that everything else you’ve been working on suddenly doesn’t.
Tech Trends 2024 reminds us of two time-honored investment principles. The first is portfolio theory. Overinvesting time, talent, and treasure into any single emerging technology, no matter how alluring, begets concentration risk and opportunity cost. As such, it’s no surprise that leading organizations aren’t putting all their eggs in any one basket. The second principle is fundamentals. We all love ‘hockey sticks’ (i.e., exponential returns), but next-generation tech requires a solid foundation. Today's sustained efforts in data, risk, cloud, and digital matter more than ever as they provide the firm footing for tomorrow’s ambitions.
With those principles in mind, this year’s report explores six trends.
Interfaces in new places: Spatial computing and the industrial metaverse. For years, discussions about virtual reality have focused on consumer use cases. But for enterprises, the real value will be in the industrial metaverse, digital twins, spatial simulations, augmented work instructions, and collaborative digital spaces.
Genie out of the bottle: Generative AI as growth catalyst. Generative AI is one of the hottest technologies we’ve seen come along in a long time, but are businesses using it to realize a competitive edge? How can they deploy it more productively?
Smarter, not harder: Beyond brute force compute. In the past, if you wanted your digital processes to go faster, all you had to do was wait a year or two for the next generation of processors. But now businesses are devising clever ways to get around – rather than through – constraints on compute performance.
From DevOps to DevEx: Empowering the engineering experience. With technology more important than ever for enterprise operations, many businesses are shifting to a developer experience mindset, which seeks to support their tech talent by giving them the tools they need to be more productive and, ultimately, more satisfied in their work.
Defending reality: Truth in an age of synthetic media. Tools for generating artificial content have proliferated in the last year or two, and now bad actors are looking to leverage them to attack businesses and their employees. The good guys are fighting back.
Core workout: From technical debt to technical wellness. Businesses are shifting from a technical debt mindset to one focused more on technical wellness. This entails monitoring and managing systems on a continuous, preventative basis rather than waiting for any one tool to redline.
A creaky core in desperate need of modernization will buckle under tomorrow’s AI-fueled workloads. An undifferentiated computation strategy will increasingly break the bank. Cumbersome interaction modalities will muddy your message, to say nothing of disengaged talent, or worse, cyber threats. If you take anything from this year’s report, it’s this: Don’t become so fixated on this year’s virtuosic soloist that you miss the rest of the symphony.
Mike Bechtel - Chief futurist | Deloitte Consulting LLP