Sure, 2023 was the year of generative AI. Enterprises and individuals alike tried out the tool for all sorts of use cases, from the bizarre—AI generated rap and bible study—to the mundane. And we’re comfortable with making our own prediction that generative AI will remain the buzz of the enterprise technology space in 2024.
But it would be a mistake to overlook many of the other game-changing technologies on the horizon for companies of all sizes and industries. Below, we’ve compiled 10 of the top enterprise technology trends for 2024.
As you ring in the new year, keep in mind these top tech trends for your upcoming digital experience initiatives.
1. Generative AI Security and Governance
While generative AI has certainly made a splash over the past year, if you’ve adopted the technology, or you are planning on doing so, you should be aware of its flaws and risks. For generative AI to succeed across the enterprise, the solution needs guardrails in place in the form of a solid AI governance framework with principles, guidelines, technology controls, and regulations that address issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy. By implementing AI governance, you can create a more trustworthy and inclusive CX environment, fostering customer loyalty and enhancing your brand reputation.
You will also need to address known risks that are unique to generative AI, including hallucinations (fabricated answers), user abuse (the ability of users to train the model on bad data and prompts), and ingested intellectual property. Risk management will be key in 2024 for generative AI as it gets more exposure—warts and all.
2. Meeting ESG Commitments through Strategic Technology
Environmental sustainability will continue to be a critical litmus test for consumers and investors in 2024. The good news is that companies with well-constructed environmental sustainability technology practices benefit the planet and the bottom line.
There are many applications of digital technology that can be used for sustainability initiatives. As the Stanford Social Innovation Review recently highlighted: “Consider how digital technologies have enabled the ongoing electrification of the transportation sector; how smart-city concepts use digital technologies to enable more efficient use of space and resources; and how the agricultural sector is drawing on spatial data and smart sensors to improve the use of land, water, and pesticides.”1
Real world talk: You don’t need to electrify a whole sector or improve natural resources to harness the power of digital sustainability for your organization (and the greater good, obviously).
When working with a top athletic apparel company, we created a digital, interactive map of the independent factories and material suppliers used to manufacture the company’s products. This map provided detailed information about the company’s global manufacturing workstreams to external partners, customers, investors, and analysts—allowing them to learn more about the company’s environmental footprint.
3. Modular Cloud Platform Technology
Cloud-native platforms empower organizations to create secure, customizable, and easy-to-manage applications that can be changed frequently with minimal effort. Microservice architecture—which allows for software to be built modularly—can speed up software development significantly, enabling companies to deliver newer customer experiences faster. This modular approach ensures that cloud platforms can be tailored to the needs of specific industries or individual organizations. In addition, out-of-the-box cloud platforms like Salesforce and Adobe are increasingly being used to build out customer facing use cases—allowing for even greater speed to market.
4. Zero Trust Security Architecture
The zero trust security model eliminates implicit trust in any one element, component, node, or service. It instead requires continuous verification in real-time from multiple sources to determine access and other system responses. It’s based on an acknowledgement that threats exist both inside and outside traditional network boundaries.2
Why is this so important? Remote work has accelerated over the past few years, and many employees will continue to work remotely into the future, with sensitive data equally as accessible from anywhere. Due to the reliability of zero-trust security architecture, those who need to access any digital asset can safely do so, no matter its location, while keeping the rest of the organization’s data secure.
As workers and systems become more distributed, the architecture as a strategy allows for protection from varied threats.
5. The Next-Gen Developer Experience
Generative AI has created an opportunity to bypass the development maturity model and go straight to a full-blown, next-generation developer experience. For those organizations that have decided that adopting generative AI into their operations is practical for them, generative AI can play a significant role in creating code snippets, providing language variants, and even summarizing and analyzing code.
6. Bringing the Next-Gen Workplace to Life
In-office, remote, hybrid, different schedules, multiple time zones—if there’s one workplace truth we’ve gained over the past few years, it’s that the future of work is flexible. But to flourish, future-forward organizations will need to adopt technology that can support a spread-out workforce.
AI and automation tools can fill this gap by establishing seamless work experiences for staff and organizations. To take advantage of these technology trends in 2024, evaluate your current workflows and consider if they are still working in this new era of work. Then, identify and engage your citizen developers—non-IT staff who are tech savvy—to use low-code tools and automation to streamline work in a hybrid model.
7. The Shift Toward First-Party Data
Users of the internet (which is all of us, really) have become savvy to the idea that our data is up for grabs by anyone managing a website or app. Resulting regulations such as GDPR and CCPA have, in turn, forced organizations to become more transparent with how they collect customer data.
2024 will see an acceleration of this trend. Digital CX practitioners should expect to see cookieless measurement platforms emerge in 2024 to provide a personalized customer experience while also complying to data privacy regulations—resulting in more personal, trust-based relationships between brands and their customers.3
8. Generative AI Acceleration and Expansion
Buckle up: Generative AI is poised to expand across the enterprise. For this to succeed, companies need to plan their integration approach. A good way to start is by assembling a proof of concept, which includes gathering potential use cases specific to your business, defining clear objectives, establishing an iterative testing approach, and establishing regular communication and feedback loops with stakeholders.
In cases where generative AI is the right approach, selecting the appropriate large language model (LLM) can make a huge difference in the cost to run the solution. Instead of larger and more advanced generative AI models, smaller and more affordable models can often deliver comparable results, making them ideal for specific use cases. If you choose to go down the path of the more established generative AI models, APIs allow you to tap into their infinite potential.
9. Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation—the ability to automate as many processes as possible—allows for a more seamless workflow for your staff and ultimately, solutions delivered to the end customer faster.
Hyperautomation can also solve the problem of dealing with “technical debt” by optimizing and synergizing the technologies that need it, creating more consistency in the process.
By being able to accelerate digital transformation through hyperautomation, organizations can ensure that their operational processes are streamlined and efficient, and that they are also resilient in the face of unexpected situations that might challenge the business (such as another pandemic or climate crisis).
10. Democratized Data
In 2024 and beyond, those whose job functions don’t primarily deal with data will continue to leverage self-service data platforms to accomplish business goals. In the past, easily digestible data hasn’t always been available to people throughout the organization. But now, with customizable solutions such as Tableau that effectively compile and display data that anyone can interpret, decision makers can quickly and easily make decisions for the business with confidence. In the future, more and more organizations will adopt this democratized approach to data analysis, allowing for better business outcomes.
We’re pumped to see many of these technology trends unfold over the coming year. Contact us to learn how we can help you implement one of these game-changing technologies into your organization.
1 “Digital Sustainability for a Better Future,” Julia Binder and Michael Wade, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2024.
2 “Zero Trust Architecture,” Computer Security Resource Center, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce.
3 “Top Marketing Trends to Watch in 2024,” Scott Clark, CMSWire, December 1, 2023.