Gartner today released the top 10 strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2024. Bart Willemsen, research vice president at Gartner, said: “Due to technological change and socioeconomic uncertainty, we must act boldly and strategically to increase resilience, rather than taking AD hoc measures. IT leaders are uniquely positioned to develop strategic plans that will help businesses succeed through these uncertainties and pressures through technology investments.”

Chris Howard, Distinguished Research Vice President and research Team Leader at Gartner, said: “IT leaders and other executives must assess the impact and benefits of strategic technology trends, but this is not easy due to the increasing pace of technological innovation. “Generative AI and other types of AI, for example, are opening up new opportunities and driving several trends, but gaining business value through long-term use of AI requires a rigorous approach to widespread adoption and risk awareness.”

Key strategic trends for 2024 include:

Democratized Generative AI

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The convergence of massively pre-trained models, cloud computing and open source is driving the democratisation of generative artificial intelligence (AI), making these models available to workers around the world. By 2026, Gartner predicts that more than 80 percent of enterprises will use generative AI apis or models, or deploy generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5 percent in early 2023.

Generative AI applications can give enterprise users access to and use a large number of internal and external sources of information, which means that the rapid adoption of generative AI will greatly contribute to the democratization of enterprise knowledge and skills. Large language models enable businesses to connect employees with knowledge in the form of conversations through rich semantic understanding.

AI Trust, Risk and Security Management

The democratization of AI has made the need for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) more urgent and clear. In the absence of guardrails, AI models can quickly produce multiple negative effects out of control, cancelling out all the positive performance and social gains brought by AI. AI TRiSM provides tools for ModelOps, proactive data protection, AI-specific security, model monitoring (including monitoring of data drift, model drift, and/or unexpected results), and third-party model and application input and output risk control.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, organizations that adopt AI TRiSM controls will improve the accuracy of their decisions by screening out up to 80 percent of false and illegal information.