CIOs have a responsibility to pay attention to emerging technologies and trends to find opportunities to improve productivity and improve operational efficiency. Investing in emerging technologies can enable CIOs to create a competitive advantage. While many emerging technologies offer potential transformational benefits, CIOs must also be aware of the challenges they may pose, such as security and privacy issues or operational complexity.
Gartner’s latest Hype cycle for emerging technologies has identified a number of disruptive technologies that will impact business and society for the next two to 10 years. CIOs must track these emerging technologies to determine their impact on organizations, as well as the innovation opportunities they will provide. In partnership with C-suite peers, strategize how to exploit them in line with the organization’s ability to handle unproven technology.
Gartner’s 2023 emerging technologies fall into four key themes: human-centered security and privacy, emerging AI, pervasive cloud, and developer experience. Here are four key technologies, covering each of these themes, that are expected to have a significant impact on enterprises within the next decade:
Generative AI
Generative AI technologies can generate new derivative versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories or original source content. Generative AI is accelerating due to the popularity of LLMs. Within the next 12 months, most technology products and services will include some form of generative AI capabilities.
New foundation models with different sizes and capacities are rapidly coming on the market. Machine learning and natural language processing platforms add generative AI capabilities for reusability of generative models, making them accessible to AI teams.
Organizations need to quantify the benefits and limitations of generative AI and provide generative AI guidelines, as it requires skills, funds and caution to execute the strategy well. Organizations must also balance technical capabilities with ethical factors and optimize the cost and effectiveness of AI solutions by using composite AI approaches to combine generative AI with other AI techniques.
I have TRiSM
AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM) is a framework that contains a set of risk and security controls and trust handlers that help enterprises manage and manage the lifecycle of AI models and applications, as well as achieve business goals .
Regulations for AI risk management – such as the EU AI Act and other regulatory frameworks in North America, China and India – are driving businesses to introduce measures for managing AI model application risk. Such regulations define new compliance requirements that organizations must meet in addition to existing ones, such as those related to privacy protection.
Organizations that do not consistently manage AI risks are exponentially more likely to experience adverse outcomes, such as project failures and breaches. Enterprises that interface with hosted, large language models (LLMs) lack native capabilities to automatically filter inputs and outputs—for example, confidential data policy violations or inaccurate information used for decision-making. AI models and applications must be constantly monitored to ensure that implementations are compliant, fair and ethical.
Once models and applications are in production, AI TRiSM becomes more challenging to adapt to the AI workflow, thereby creating inefficiencies and opening the process to potential risks. Setting up an organizational task force or dedicated unit to manage AI TRiSM efforts is an important first step.
Cloud sustainability
Increasing attention and focus on environmental and social issues motivates organizations to improve their sustainability position. Cloud computing has great potential to improve sustainability outcomes through efficiency of operations and the delivery of cloud-based technology innovations.
Cloud sustainability is the use of cloud services to achieve sustainability benefits within economic, environmental and social systems. As such, cloud sustainability refers to both the sustainable operation and delivery of cloud services by a cloud provider, as well as the consumption and use of cloud services by organizations and individuals to achieve sustainability outcomes.
Achieving cloud sustainability outcomes is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the customer. Cloud providers must demonstrate sustainable cloud operations, and cloud consumers must use sustainability practices in their use of cloud services. CIOs must proactively engage with relevant managers and other internal stakeholders to create and achieve sustainability goals. They must also establish credible metrics to measure and report cloud sustainability outcomes.
AI-Augmented Software Engineering
AI-augmented software engineering (AIASE) is the use of AI technologies, such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), to help software engineers create, deliver, and maintain applications. It is integrated within engineers’ existing tools to provide real-time, intelligent feedback and suggestions.
AI powered automation enables software engineers to focus their time, energy, and creativity on high-value activities such as feature development. It accelerates application delivery and allocates software engineering capacity to high-priority business initiatives, automatically generating test scenarios that were previously created manually.
Software engineers who fear job obsolescence have shown resistance to AIASE. Because of this, it is important to reassure software engineers that AIASE is a supplemental toolkit for human engineers, rather than a replacement.
About the author:
Arun Chandrasekaran is a Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner where he provides strategic advice to CTOs and CIOs on how to drive technology innovation within enterprise IT. Gartner analysts will provide additional analysis on emerging technologies, as well as advice for technology leaders at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpotakes place October 16-19 in Orlando, Florida.
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