Rohan Joshi is the CEO and co-founder of Wolken Software, a leading IT service management and customer service desk software provider.
There is no shortage of enterprise IT “to-do’s” as we start the new year. It’s clear that generative AI is here to stay, and CIOs must learn to contend with harnessing its power in secure and valuable ways. The “cloud wars” will rage on as IT teams attempt to create the cloud environments that best serve their organizations, and enterprise security is facing an onslaught of new and evolving threats.
Given the current landscape, here are three areas of focus CIOs must address for a successful 2024.
Enterprise-Grade Generative AI
As generative AI moves beyond the hype stage, organizations need to start defining their plans to use the technology to generate measurable value. Over the past year, executives at large organizations that manage enterprise-level technology stacks truly started to understand not only the potential of using generative AI but the pitfalls as well, such as potential hallucination, bias and security concerns.
As such, it has remained at the periphery of the enterprise. However, as more legal and compliance work has been done to understand the ramifications of generative AI, in 2024, we can expect to see its use extend beyond marketing and engineering into areas like design, planning and strategy.
Product life cycle management in many industries has adopted enterprise generative AI and is showing around 30% efficiency gains, based on what I’m seeing in the industry. I am largely seeing these kinds of efficiency upgrades in the semiconductor, financial services and contract manufacturing spaces. For example, many manufacturing enterprises have decreased new product introduction cycles from nine months down to six months.
Similarly, 2021’s chip shortage had a global impact across many industries, including automotive, domestic appliances and medical device companies. Based on my experience in the industry as of late, generative AI has helped these businesses improve their time to market by about 25-30%.
Cybersecurity
While security has been an issue since the enterprise has existed, threat perception has assumed new dimensions since the pandemic. During the initial pandemic days, the mantra was simply to “keep the lights on.”
During that time, there was a notable uptick in email phishing, with such instances increasing from maybe once a quarter to several times a week. End users were the weakest link in this chain, and many companies paid the price, leading to firewall upgrades, new counter-threat software and more.
In 2023, we saw a major effort in the space around upskilling CISO teams to reduce phishing and other enterprise security threats. However, these things can never be fully eliminated, and oftentimes, we see such malevolent activities originate from within an organization, even if unintentional.
CIOs have a responsibility to continuously upskill their entire organization in matters of digital literacy, and we have seen the enterprise software and banking industries do this well. In 2024, we can expect this initiative to take center stage across industries and organizations of all sizes. Digital literacy to bolster enterprise security only becomes more critical as generative AI use in the workplace grows more prevalent.
Managing Hybrid Cloud Environments
Over the last decade, we’ve seen many enterprise benefits of cloud adoption come to light. However, in mitigating concerns around privacy, regulatory and security issues in cloud computing, many enterprises have opted for a hybrid approach combining both on-prem, cloud and, in some instances, multi-cloud solutions. I anticipate that this move toward hybrid environments will continue into 2024, given the benefits such an approach brings, including flexibility, cost management, scalability and compliance.
Orchestration is key here, and CIOs have to ensure that enterprise assets, edge devices and storage are not compromised as old protocols are updated to ensure smooth, seamless and secure data exchange across the enterprise.
By addressing these three priorities, enterprise CIOs can ensure they’re laying the foundation for their IT teams and organizations to thrive this year.
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