It’s not your imagination. The pace of change is accelerating. Advances in technology are coming faster and faster. Against this backdrop, we enter 2024 with top tech trends that may not be new in concept but have surged in importance and activity due to rapid changes in technological capabilities, rising demand, and today’s business challenges. Let’s take a look at five major trends:
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
ChatGPT may have captured the lion’s share of attention in 2023, but advancements in AI and ML are driving more substantial improvements than helping the grammar-challenged among us write better sentences. Here are just a few examples:
- Cybersecurity – Cybercriminals use AI to probe for vulnerabilities and refine attacks on systems and human targets. Leading security solutions leverage AI and ML to fight fire with fire, from threat sorting and automatic remediation to detecting previously unknown threats from anomalous data.
- Augmented Analytics – AI and ML can simplify and automate complicated data analysis throughout its lifecycle (from collection to analytics), making it easier to optimize processes, predict outcomes, identify and generate growth opportunities, and respond to changes in market conditions or customer behavior.
- Automation – By the close of 2023, generative AI’s strengths and weaknesses were cataloged, and its true assistive value was emerging. Expect more companies to leverage AI and ML for efficiencies in 2024 as they make their way into platforms that make users better, faster and more efficient at everything from the creative (such as design, special effects and prods for breaking writer’s block) to the mundane (like project management, scheduling, data organization, coding, information retrieval and cloud workload automation) and everything in between.
2. Cyber Resilience
The AI-driven battle between malware and cybersecurity solutions is just one front in the ongoing war against cybercrime. Another front – cyber resilience – lies in the ability of businesses to withstand and recover from attacks — ideally fast enough to avoid heavy costs in downtime, lost revenue, and reputation damage.
Cyber resilience also addresses risks from natural disasters, extreme weather, and other natural causes of business interruption. Because of the omnipresence of both human- and nature-made risks, we entered 2024 with businesses of all sizes developing business continuity and disaster recovery plans and adopting solutions like Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
3. Sustainable Technology (Green Tech)
As the world confronts the impacts of climate change on our physical and economic environments, sustainability has become central to the business development and sourcing strategies of technology adopters and providers alike. Sustainability strategies address materials and components sourcing, natural resource and energy consumption, and all other aspects of technology hardware and services manufacturing and delivery. Many firms, like Cox Business, entered 2024 with hard commitments to long-term goals for waste management and carbon and water neutrality.
4. IoT & Smart Cities
Sustainability also resides at the center of Smart City initiatives that leverage connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to manage community infrastructure, services and resources better. Smart lights and parks, remote security cameras, water meters and much more are helping communities develop and retrofit infrastructure for:
- long-term sustainability and environmental consciousness
- reductions in operating costs and total costs of ownership (TCO)
- greater security for businesses, infrastructure and residents
- attracting businesses and business investments
- overall enhanced quality of life for smart city residents
5. Edge Computing
All the trends we’ve listed so far have something in common: they’re data- and data-processing intensive, which gets us to our fifth big trend for 2024 — edge computing. Sure, some workloads can and should be handled by cloud processing, but when speed is essential to user experience, bringing compute closer to users is critical. This reality also exists for other data- and bandwidth-consumptive trends that didn’t make our Top 5 list (this year), like augmented and virtual reality.
Your Partner Today, Tomorrow and Always
Cox Business can help your business leverage the powerful capabilities behind these emerging trends. As your technology partner, it’s our mission to stay ahead of technology advances, test and employ them in our own business, and deliver and manage them for your business so that we face the future and thrive together.
