By Sameer Danave, Senior Director Marketing, MSys Technologies
With digital transformations hogging the limelight, we list the crucial trends that will shape the adoption of digital technologies in the business landscape in 2024 and beyond.
Evolving businesses, flickering customers, and regulatory challenges continue to keep digital transformations on their toes. While many significant shifts marked the discipline in the last couple of years, here’s a comprehensive list of the trends that will shape future developments in the field of digital technologies:
1. Hyper Automation and AI-Driven Automation: Automation can significantly enhance efficiency and save person-hours for achieving strategically relevant organisational goals. While many companies have achieved automation in their business models, 2024 will likely witness wider adoption of hyper automation across business segments. Thanks to the support of AI tools, Hyper Automation allows managing many complex processes and enables firms to achieve significantly faster and more efficient results; no wonder its popularity is surging by the day and will breach new levels going forward.
2. Democratisation of AI and Low-Code Development: Thanks to the continuously evolving paradigm of low-code development, technology access and use have become democratised worldwide . With no code development tools, firms today no longer require specialised coders to integrate AI, ML, and automation technologies into their business models. Further, the no-code allows firms to innovate fast, customised offerings, and operate efficiently to achieve superior business results.
3. Edge-driven Decision-making: Real-time capabilities of edge computing to analyse data and make decisions put it in a league of its own. At the heart of these capabilities is an amazing duo of AI and ML that can collect, process, and manage large swaths of data to generate insights on a real-time basis. All these capabilities thus prove instrumental in making superior decision-making both on strategic and tactical levels of operations.
4. Ethical AI and Explainable AI (XAI): To address ethical concerns related to AI, companies must use fair, transparent, and justified AI policies. The need has been well recognized and the fast emergence of Ethical AI applications can be partially attributed to this enhanced recognition. Now, taking the bar of Ethical AI a notch higher, Explainable AI (XAI) is gaining prominence. XAI allows stakeholders to know how decisions are made by AI using different models and algorithms, and in 2024, we expect a further surge in XAI popularity across industry verticals.
5. AI-Powered Cybersecurity: While the cybersecurity domain continues to witness many innovations, AI-powered safety and security tools will prove a game-changer for the segment in the medium to long term . AI tools can proactively identify potential threats by quickly analysing , managing, and shutting down operations in case of a breach; it can save firms from the damaging impact of data hacking.
6. Human-AI Collaboration and Augmentation: Unlike previous years, 2024 will witness a remarkable shift in human and AI collaborations to achieve enhanced business capabilities. Forrester Research predicts that these collaborations will create 9% of new employment opportunities in the US by 2025. In addition, firms are waking up to the wonderful potential that combining human resources and technology can create for businesses across product and service categories.
7. Personalised Experiences and Customer-Centric AI: By offering personalised experiences, AI can help organisations achieve a sustained competitive edge over rival firms. Further, the role of AI in delivering customer-centric service support is equally crucial. A survey found that most customers are switching to AI-powered chatbots as they offer a quick, effective, enriched experience compared to their manual counterparts.
8. AI-Powered Innovation and Disruption: AI is projected to have an annual growth of 37.3% between 2023 and 2030, according to Grand View Research. Significantly , the crucial role of AI in accelerating innovation and disrupting business models will help uptick in its demand in the future. We anticipate digital technologies to continue their winning streak in 2024 and help create new avenues of growth, profitability, and market expansion for businesses worldwide .
9. Pursuing Sustainability: The impactful role of digital transformation in achieving sustainability is very well documented today. Digital Tools such as AI, ML, and automation are playing a crucial role in increasing efficiency, reducing wastage, and cutting emissions and will continue to help organisations become more agile, lean, and environmentally friendly in their operations in the future.
10. Non-technical Sectors: AI applications will likely further their dominance beyond the technical domains in 2024. The sectors like transportation, manufacturing, construction, health care, and retail will show a marked uptick in AI adoption in the coming years. In sum, AI will spread its wings far and wide beyond technical sectors and help traditional industries enhance their operational efficiency and functional effectiveness, just like it does for the technical domains.
As we headlong into 2024, the trends mentioned above will likely shape the adoption, integration, and management of digital transformations happening across industrial sectors. Positive regulator stance, enhanced levels of acceptability, and the willingness of customers to embrace digital transformation wholeheartedly are emerging as key enablers for the digital revolution. The stage is set for the global landscape to take a huge stride. By equipping themselves with digital tools, firms can take their success story to a different level altogether.