Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Enterprise AI will Boom in 2024, And It's Not About Chat
By Fred Swaniker, Founder and CEO, Sand Technologies
Every enterprise has essentially become a data center. That
term inspires visions of the facilities that compute and enable our always-on
way of life. But when you consider that the amount of enterprise data doubled between 2020 and 2022, there's no
denying that companies are now centers of vast amounts of information. Proper
management is critical, but the larger challenge in 2024 is how enterprises can
make sense of that data and uncover insights to fuel their growth.
AI is critical to unlocking those opportunities. While
2023's headlines often focused on natural-language bots and essay-writing
assistants, 2024 will mark a return to AI's foundational values. To be clear,
AI has advanced incredibly during the past 12 months, and that excitement
pushed AI to account for 25% of all US startup investments
in 2023, more than twice 2022's levels. This interest and energy will not be
undone; the AI landscape has forever changed.
Yet while many companies were introduced to AI novelties
last year, leaders will look at 2023 as a reminder to return to their AI
strategies that fell dormant when the spotlight shone on other technologies.
Those companies, already aware of AI's positive impact on their bottom line,
will push beyond the headlines and apply AI to data using frameworks that drive
meaningful business outcomes.
Companies across industries will see the data across their
organization as a low-hanging fruit for enterprise AI. Whether that data be
structured or unstructured, siloed or scattered, AI can help companies gain
valuable insights about trends, patterns and opportunities for growth.
Thousands of organizations have already recognized this. Sand Technologies,
for example, has helped a number of them benefit from AI-driven data insights.
In telecom, AI helped a global leader deploy a multimillion-dollar
network. An insurance leader leveraged AI to predict risk and uncover hidden profits from
its data. In the water sector, applying AI to data enabled a leading utility to
adjust its wastewater management strategy and prevent
pollution. In each of these scenarios, AI was critical to making
sense of the data and developing a productive, profitable path forward.
These examples will be launchpads for organizations' renewed
efforts in 2024 to analyze and interpret their data using powerful AI models,
mindful that applying AI to data provides not only positive results, but quick
wins.
The long-term need is clear; enterprise data management is projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.1% through
2030. Yet even foundational investments need to demonstrate short-term ROI. AI
plays a crucial role in this regard, helping CIOs and CTOs balance long-term
innovation with short-term success.
For example, AI-augmented digital twins can evaluate more
and larger datasets, enabling faster innovation and more-informed decision
making. AI can quickly analyze enterprise data to identify new cost-containment
opportunities and operational efficiencies. CTOs can even use AI to break down
tech-stack siloes that surfaced during independent cloud migrations and digital
transformations. In each of these scenarios, and hundreds more, applying AI to
enterprise data can provide the quick tech wins companies need to justify their
longer-term IT strategies.
In short, the AI fever of 2023 will ignite a 2024
renaissance in enterprise AI. This rebirth will go far beyond customer-service
chatbots and personalized marketing. It will reach deep into the organization
to enable both digital and business transformation. After a frenzied 12-month
newscycle, global enterprises are standing at attention, ready to deploy AI in
ways that deliver tangible ROI. Leveraging AI to make sense of all that
organizational data will be the path of least resistance - and greatest profitability.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fred Swaniker is Founder and CEO of Sand Technologies, a
global tech-services and talent-solutions company that reignites clients' ability to envision and achieve a
bold future through enterprise AI, data science, software engineering and IoT.
He recently won a 2023 TIME100 Impact Award, and he was recognized in 2019 as
one of TIME 100's Most Influential People.