Editor’s note: This article draws on insights from a CIO Dive virtual event panel. You can register here to watch a replay of the full event, “What Technologies Will Win and Lose in 2024,” here.
Companies expect IT executives to cut through the noise and deliver value to the organization using technology. This year, the hype felt more dense than in years past.
Interest in generative AI unleashed widespread demand for implementation. However, before companies could see positive outcomes, they had to put work into the underlying elements, which include cloud and talent.
In 2024, CIOs will continue to look for the perfect alignment between the components of their tech strategy, their customers' expectations and the resources they have in hand. Ideally, experiments will be guided by knowledge from 2023’s wins and failures.
Last week, CIO Dive convened half a dozen experts to discuss 2024 technology outlooks across three key categories: cloud, talent and AI. Here are some key takeaways from our conversations.
(Responses were lightly edited for clarity and brevity.)
Generative AI
"Looking at your own architecture and formulating it right is so crucial. For companies like us, we're spending 2023 and 2024 really looking at our architecture and making sure the foundation can be relatable to how the data is going to come out. And then, of course, making sure that, not only do I have the right tech stack, but I'm educating on how the tech stack is working, so that when we're putting the data in it's coming back out the right way."
-Dara Meath, SVP and CTO at Build-A-Bear Workshop
"There was so much hype at the beginning of the year that some organizations started to think: this is just gonna work immediately, it's gonna change everything overnight and it's gonna be so easy. Of course, that's never true. There's never a silver bullet. Companies are going to start to see failures and, coming through that hype cycle and then realizing where the value is, I think it's going to be challenging over the next year."
-Amanda Luther, managing director and partner, global co-lead of digital transformation at Boston Consulting Group
Talent
“GenAI is going to have a massive impact on roles and hiring. I think we are going to start to see the need for ML engineers and LLM developers. 2024 is going to be when companies figure out what their data strategy is and how to populate it with talent."
-Martha Heller, CEO at Heller Search
“One of the talent trends we’ll see in 2024 is upskilling and a greater demand for training existing resources because it just costs a lot less if they have the aptitude for it. At least in my experience, while education is remaining as a screening function, it’s not as important as certifications, aptitude and experience because finding someone with an LLM degree is very difficult, but if they have practical experience, that actually counts for more.”
-Claire Rutkowski, SVP and CIO Champion at Bentley Systems
Cloud
"We're seeing most cloud service providers commoditizing the access and implementation of AI, ML and Gen AI. What that means is they're making it much more simpler to experiment with or build out Gen AI. For us, Google Cloud's Gen AI app builder was an example. We got access to this a few months ago, and we were able to prototype an entire info bot that could potentially be placed on our website after it passes through all our risk compliance controls. That's the trend I would see coming up in the next few years: companies will find it increasingly easy and be able to experiment with Gen AI."
-Ninish Ukkan, CTO at Arvest Bank
"At Capital One, we're pretty public about being serverless first. Going forward, I think we'll see others on a similar journey, whether it be serverless or some other way of moving up the stack, so that we are getting more and more out of the business of maintaining that infrastructure, out of caring about data centers, leave that to our providers, and really invest the time in our engineering work and in our customers."
-Anne Johnston, VP, cloud costs and engagement at Capital One
