Munich, December 11, 2023: A cohort of authors from the digital consulting, solutions, and software house valantic has identified ten trends that will help shape many businesses’ digitalization initiatives in 2024. Besides the further development of AI solutions in the framework of Conversational AI, the authors also cited, amongst others, the significance of hyper-personalization of the customer experience through AI, the intensification of IT security measures, and the growing importance of holistic, sustainable transformation. The authors further believe that the optimization of the digital employee experience will play a decisive role in recruiting and retaining skilled workers.
Although, globally, digitalization is dynamic and varies by region, industry, and organization, IT decision-makers across the board will continue to intensify their efforts to further digitalize their processes and services in 2024. This will include the implementation of technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation solutions to promote efficiency and innovation. To this end, companies are concentrating increasingly on improving the customer experience through digital channels. Personalized offers, the safe use of conversational AI, and the use of data analytics form the core of these initiatives.
As regards the latest hype surrounding conversational AI, Daniel Völker, Head of valantic’s AI Solutions Department, says: “Companies are now rolling up their sleeves. They’re looking for solutions that use generative AI safely, compliantly, and productively in a business context. This trend will gather momentum in 2024.”
IT security will be a further hot topic in 2024 following the continued popular use of ransomware among cyber-attackers in 2023. Ransomware is an attack vector that uses crypto-algorithms to encrypt entire IT systems, thereby rendering them unusable. The consequences of ransomware attacks can be devastating for the targeted companies, with losses often running into millions. It is thus unsurprising that, in a recent Lünendonk survey (available in German only) of the CIOs of German companies, investment in IT security was identified as the top priority for 2024.
“Cyber criminals are inventive and constantly catching their victims unawares with new forms of attacks. The trend is towards simultaneously combining several attack vectors, thus maximizing the pressure on the assailed organizations,” says Thomas Lang, Managing Partner at valantic.
Bitkom, the industry association of the German information and telecommunications sector, also predicts rapid growth in cloud usage and describes cloud technologies as the “new normal” for the operation of IT solutions. In the digital association’s Cloud Report 2023 (available in German only), 56% of the polled companies said they intend to be running over half their IT applications in the cloud in five years.
“Besides the classic benefits – above all flexible and scalable IT usage, and minimized investments and operating expenses – the cloud primarily promotes swift innovation and access to this by smaller companies and the broad masses. The rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT demonstrates this impressively,” says valantic author and Senior Manager Stephan Kuhn.
The valantic authors took a closer look at the following ten IT trends in the Trend Whitepaper 2024:
White paper: The 10 Most Important Digitalization Trends in 2024
The whitepaper, which contains further information on the individual trends and possible recommendations for action for IT decision-makers, can be downloaded free of charge from the valantic website.
