Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The uncertainty of the global economy in 2024 is maintaining pressure on organisations in Asia Pacific to build more resilient businesses and structures to enable greater efficiency through automation and technology.

The past few years have shown just how vulnerable businesses are not just to disruption, but also to global events that impact the supply chain, the workforce (and availability of talent), as well as access to the technology and tools required for business-as-usual.

Ilya Gutlin, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, says, “We are already seeing a global economy that is facing significant geopolitical tension and economic uncertainty. This makes it even critical that businesses invest in technology to enable long term sustainability and resilience in the face of constant volatility, increasing the organisation’s chances for success.”

Here are a few key trends that Alcatel sees impacting this view, and which are worth paying greater attention to in the year to come.

Trend 1: We will see the pervasive adoption of AI across industries.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) started out with a bang, showing immediate application and potential to transform multiple business functions, whether in helping streamline the content creation process, reviewing code snippets, or to assist in generating responses to queries. However, business leaders must approach generative AI with eyes wide open, and by establishing clear ethical frameworks in how to deploy the technology.

In 2024, we can expect the technology to be used more extensively in business data analytics to augment productivity through smarter automation. Organisations can tap on AI to distil the massive amounts of data available today at our fingertips, while the insights gleaned and communicated to the end user in the relevant context can prove invaluable in high-stakes scenarios such as healthcare, mission critical operations, and crisis management.

Utilising AI for network management accelerates operations, ensuring optimal performance. AI can adapt to varying network conditions, making real-time decisions in optimising network health and traffic flows or even to remediate potential security issues before they happen, thus reducing downtime and streamlining processes.

In doing this, businesses can partner with experienced technology providers to unlock the potential of AI with drastically reduced costs, significantly improved efficiencies in delivery, and maximised offerings to customers that will enable them to maintain a competitive edge.

Trend 2: Investing in performance over presence as a transformation of the modern workforce (and workplace).

For many companies today, the conversation is how to adapt the new and dynamic demands of the workforce and where work is done, whether in the office, or at home. As companies increasingly lean on geographically distributed teams and a global talent pool, there is the need to have the right technology investments, such as AI tools and functionality embedded in collaboration suites, that enable more effective collaboration between employees, regardless of their location.

Investing in technology and smarter tools looks to be a focus for 2024; in fact, 76% of the CEOs in PWC’s 26th annual CEO Survey for 2023 note that they plan to invest in automating processes and systems in the year to come. This reallocation of human capital can significantly boost productivity, as employees are freed from busy work, and enabled to spend more time with strategic and creative output, and ultimately have more control over their work processes.

Forrester’s 2024 predictions also note that enterprise AI initiatives will boost productivity and creative problem solving by 50% in the year to come. This presents an opportunity for businesses to continue investing in training their employees. The learnings should centre around giving the employees a base and methodology of how to approach difficult problems creatively and collaboratively and to include data from disparate sources. Aided by AI, the companies that enable this approach in their teams will get ahead as the technology evolves in complexity.

Trend 3: Surging demand for AI is driving demand for AI-ready digital infrastructure.

The surging demand for AI is real; nearly half of the companies (47%) surveyed by CNBC say that AI is their top priority for tech spending over the next year, and AI budgets are more than double the second-biggest spending area in tech, cloud computing, at 21%.

At the same time, nations across Asia Pacific are already formulating national strategies concerning AI and digital infrastructure, with the aim of addressing the growing necessity for a better understanding of domestic AI compute capacity. More recently, Singapore announced an update to its original AI strategy launched in 2019; National AI Strategy 2.0 includes considerations to scale up AI for compelling use cases in sectors including advanced manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, education, and public services.

However, many facilities are not equipped to support the high-performance computing and high-bandwidth networking requirements that AI workloads require. In fact, more than four in 10 IT leaders surveyed globally believe their existing IT infrastructure is not fully prepared for the demands of AI.

As such, the coming years will see increased demand for purpose-built, highly scalable, and flexible digital infrastructure that can accommodate the compute and networking performance requirements of high-performance workloads such as AI. Organizations who want to be able to innovate and stay competitive must invest in transforming their digital infrastructure to reinforce their strategic advantage.

(0)(0)