Forward thinking: Three key trends for the future of technology in 2024

We are living in a time of profound technological change, and business leaders are grappling with big challenges including sustainability, and artificial intelligence (AI) risk. With analyst firm Gartner having recently shared its Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2024, we, at Lenovo, can see three big technological shifts that particularly stand out.

One of the predictions outlines an increasing drive towards sustainable technology, with enterprises embracing data and emerging technologies to manage issues such as e-waste. Furthermore, we can expect a growing market for ‘machine customers’, which can automatically buy everything from shopping carts to servers, and companies will earn billions as they build digital marketplaces to tempt these binary buyers. Finally, organisations which operationalise managing AI risk will see increased adoption of their AI models.

So how can business leaders capitalise on these shifts in the technology landscape and use them to their advantage? Standing on the threshold of vast changes sparked by evolving technology, I believe each of these three trends offers forward-thinking business leaders a key opportunity to take the lead over slower competitors. What will these changes mean for organisations over the decades to come?

Taking sustainability seriously

Business leaders are sensitive to the environmental impact of technology, and aware that proactively engaging with sustainability issues has a myriad of benefits for the whole organisation. Gartner’s distinguished VP Analyst, Chris Howard recently shared in a Keynote Session at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo that 74% executives believe sustainability increases digital maturity and “86% consider that it helps resilience ”. Over the next year, IT leaders will be held directly responsible for the impact of the technologies they use, not just in-house but across the whole supply chain, and “by 2027, 25% of CIO’s compensation will be linked to their sustainable technology impact according to Gartner.”

Global regulations will increasingly require organisations to be transparent about what they are doing in terms of sustainability, and this will have an important impact on how they develop. As businesses rush to embrace AI, they will need to take a balanced overview of the benefits and drawbacks of such technology. AI uses vastly more energy than conventional computing, according to the International Energy Agency, with a recent study by the Allen Institute for AI suggesting that creating one image with generative AI uses an amount of energy equal to fully charging a smartphone. Sustainable technology is about finding the right balance of result and footprint. Technologies such as video calling helping to boost sustainability, by reducing the need to travel, for example, and edge computing by increasing the efficiency of traffic in smart cities, as seen in Lenovo’s ambitious project in Barcelona.

The right tech can also help organisations take an overview of their emissions and waste, with important benefits in both financial and sustainability terms. Lenovo’s ‘Data for Humanity’ research report reveals that leading executives believe data will play a crucial role in helping organisations deal with challenges such as climate change. With the right software, businesses can reduce the environmental impact of their IT estate by tracking performance and usage data, including server utilisation and the number of end-user devices per employee. This will help them cut down unnecessary spend and reduce e-waste. Setting clear, realistic targets, and partnering with respected organisations such as the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) will also be fundamental to driving sustainability in the coming years.

Business leaders should target material, high-importance issues, even if that hurts financially at first, because the rewards will be considerable. Management should invest in emerging technologies, which in turn will help organisations to discover new, sustainable business models and products.

Machines buying from machines

The customer of the future won’t always be a human. Instead, a large amount of commerce will be conducted automatically by machines. Gartner calculates that “machine customers represent a multitrillion-dollar opportunity” and “by 2025, there will be, conservatively, at least 15 billion connected products with the potential to behave as customers”.

Machine customers already exist in the form of services, such as Tesla vehicles’ capacity to autonomously self-diagnose mechanical issues and order the required parts without human involvement. But this will evolve quickly in the coming years, with machines which are designed to make deals and purchase goods from suppliers, and automated markets which vie to win the favour of robotic shoppers, in both the consumer and B2B worlds.

Today’s machine customers are very limited as they are required to follow strict rules and purchase only specific items. By 2025, this will have changed, and they will make optimised selections among different products based on rules. By 2026, this will evolve further, to where machines infer customer needs based on rules, context and preferences, and the machine customers have their own ‘needs’ to help them close deals effectively. Organisations will construct platforms specifically to cater to them, competing via measures such as price control. According to Gartner’s research, “CEO’s believe that, on average, 15-20% of their companies’ revenue will come from machine customers by 2030”.  I believe this means we can expect streamlined sales cycles and boosted revenue.

Forward-thinking IT leaders should begin to investigate the benefits of using machine customers now, testing the technologies in a lean start-up fashion, or start to think about adding machine and human-machine customer journeys to their digital commerce marketplaces.

Managing AI risk

Last year saw an explosion of interest in AI, as ChatGPT became its unofficial ‘mascot’ around the world, and organisations raced to harness its potential. Generative AI’s democratisation of the technology has increased the urgency for dealing with its risks, especially in terms of fairness, explainability, transparency and model governance. In the coming year, business leaders will grapple with the challenges of deploying AI and managing the ways employees use it.

So how can organisations approach risk and security management when it comes to AI? Taking a structural approach to AI trust, risk and security management can control the inherent risks of the technology, as well as aiding regulatory compliance. Gartner predicts, “by 2026, companies that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the number and time it takes to operationalise AI models by at least 25%”.

Taking a structural approach can also yield results when it comes to some of the thorniest problems with AI, such as bias, where models trained on biased language exhibit the same biases themselves. Business leaders should develop comprehensive programmes to deal with AI risks and security, clearly defining acceptable use policies as well as implementing data classification and access management for AI applications. Dealing effectively with AI risk, trust and security management will be the hallmark of organisations that succeed in the space, and will enable broader collaboration between companies.

A better tomorrow

2024 will be the time for business leaders to tackle the big issues around AI risk and sustainability. With increasing regulation around both AI and sustainability on every continent, organisations must take a long view and ensure they embrace technology responsibly, considering its impact within their own organisation and its impact on the wider world. These issues are only going to grow in importance, and organisations which deal with these challenges in the coming year will have a useful head start, with considerable rewards for forward-thinking.

For business leaders who embrace emerging fields such as machine customers, using AI to close deals and streamline sales cycles, the rewards will be enormous. Taking a structural approach to AI will enable businesses to embrace the technology effectively, uncovering game-changing applications and use cases that are yet to be seen. Using technology to unravel the challenges of sustainability will lead to more digitally mature organisations, new products, and fresh ways to do business. The world is changing around us, but with the right decisions, the future for businesses is bright in 2024 and beyond.