Employee Experience, Automated Workflows, and AI: 2024 IT Industry Predictions

Read on to see their take on what we can expect to see change in IT, employee and customer experience, automated workflows, and more.

Another year is in the books, and with it came some monumental shifts in businesses' approach to IT—and their overall relationships with technology. Emerging and evolving technologies like generative AI continue to upend standard practices and enable new levels of efficiency for organizations already embracing it. It's on IT leaders to not only keep pace with the changes but to anticipate them and make sure their teams (and the tech they use) are prepared to take them in stride.

We asked CEO Mark Banfield, CTO Ian van Reenen, and CMO/CRO Stephen Tarleton about the trends they've been seeing leading into 2024, and what they mean for the industry. Check out their predictions below!

Mark Banfield, CEO

IT prioritization will be key

"A recent Forrester analysis indicates there's still a critical lack of alignment between business and tech strategy. In this current economic climate, tech leaders are facing the pressure of doing more with less. This includes extending the lifespan of their existing IT assets and making strategic decisions about how to allocate limited budgets. We'll see more conversation around how new technologies will drive ROI and what costs organizations will save on by investing in them. As a result, IT leaders will need to prioritize the most impactful things for their organization rather than experiment with new technologies."

The modernization of IT operations teams

"As organizations look to the New Year, we'll see a significant shift in how service is delivered. IT teams will move away from the old world, where organizations rely on manual processes and legacy technology that can't provide real-time control or adequate results. Instead, we'll move into a new world that focuses on modernized end-user computing.

With devices becoming more complex and employees logging on from multiple networks, 2024 will be the year organizations finally end the problem of "configuration drift." This happens when employees interchange between different setups (home office, corporate office, etc.), and their devices struggle to keep up when exchanging networks. As environments become more intricate and involve legacy technology, SaaS platforms, collaboration tools, and the cloud, the "drift" only gets worse. Embracing the new world of IT will bring a finely tuned and calibrated end-user experience that'll prove reliable for all employees and eliminate negative device experiences."

Stephen Tarleton, CMO/CRO

EX catches up to CX

"2024 will be the year that the employee experience (EX) will catch up to the customer experience (CX). Over the past several years, there's been a massive focus and investment in digital transformation—and it isn't slowing down. IDC forecasts that worldwide digital transformation spending will reach $3.9 trillion by 2027. However, these investments have historically been focused on the customer experience.

Take, for example, your relationship with your bank. It's likely that over the past few years, you've transitioned to online banking or managing your bank account via an app on your phone. This is an example of the power of digital transformation on the customer side. Yet, employees haven't received these same benefits. Their interactions with their employers are still largely the same as they were pre-pandemic. An example of this is Zoom—many employees still struggle with video conferencing issues or crashes daily. In 2024, we'll start to see this gap close and the employee experience will become as much of a priority to enterprises as the customer experience is."

Building trust in AI

"Artificial intelligence has boomed over the past year and become the latest buzzword—even though it is a technology that's been used in business for many years. Free tools like ChatGPT have ushered it into mainstream conversations and turned it into a household term. However, when it comes to enterprises, the downside of tools like ChatGPT is that, while it can easily generate content such as company messaging, it isn't able to adequately understand the context or produce the nuances and uniqueness that humans can. Sales and Marketing are fields largely focused on human psychology—we must keep that human involvement while we continue to build trust in AI-powered technologies.

2024 will be the year of building trust in AI. Business leaders will need to invest heavily in building trust in AI in addition to investing in the technologies themselves. Prioritize ethical decision-making training within the workforce for AI models to emulate. Additionally, evaluate data from AI systems to remove biases and validate in real-world business scenarios."

Ian van Reenen, CTO

The year of automation

"Automation will take center stage in 2024 as IT teams are expected to do more with less and squeeze budgets. A recent Forrester analysis predicted that only one in ten technology leaders would get growth right despite clear calls to action from senior leadership next year. I predict that this number will be worse, so leaders must pivot to automation to bring down operational costs and increase team efficiency.

One of the ways we'll see automation in action next year is within the IT help desk. If organizations can reduce the number of issues and incidents, that'll decrease the volume of tickets reaching the service desk daily, which will cut costs and give time back to the user. Another way is through personalized customer service. Being intentional about the client-customer relationship, and augmenting a customer team that can provide concierge-style services, will help vendors to do more with current capabilities."

AI Implementation Challenges

"Tech leaders today are being challenged to adopt AI to drive advancements for their organizations. Many are grappling with the question of, "Where and how do we deploy AI?" AI will accelerate many things by filling in information gaps, but it's not a complete substitute for data-driven decision-making or analysis. We must also consider the distinction between the value of generative AI and other tools like machine learning and pattern recognition.  Before diving in fully, we must ask how our businesses can specifically benefit from investing in AI and if it'll provide the right outcomes."

IT leaders must be careful with how they implement new tools into existing workflows, and not adopt them solely for the sake of doing so. The hype around AI can be alluring, but also presents a stumbling risk for any company diving in headfirst without doing their homework.

With so much to bear in mind in the new year, balance will be crucial. Though we can expect IT teams and resources to be stretched thinner, a rise of automated processes and handy AI tools will help boost employee efficiency to new heights. Tech leaders will come to more clearly recognize the impact their company's tech has on their success (and on their employees' ability to drive it).

For more expert insights like these on emerging tech and IT strategies for the new year, be sure to keep an eye on our blog!