Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2024: The Year of the Intelligent Enterprise
By Members of Alteryx
According to Alteryx research, 80% of enterprise leaders agreed access to data improves their own decision-making, and the majority indicated advanced technologies such as analytics, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence help deliver faster decisions.
Alteryx Chief Information Officer Trevor Schulze and Chief Product Officer Suresh Vittal explore top AI and analytics trends that will drive better, smarter decision-making in 2024.
According to Schulze, “In 2024, tech leaders, more than ever, need to be the changemakers that enable their organizations to take advantage of increasingly AI-driven systems to drive innovation and solve complex problems at unprecedented speeds. We’ll see companies increase their investments in technologies such as generative AI, AI/ML platforms, and MLOps to support this transformation, and tech leaders must help their business partners embrace these technologies to adapt and excel in an increasingly complex and data-driven business environment.”
For employees, this era of intelligence means they’ll need to pull from a wide range of knowledge and learning to be effective and future-proof their careers. “This will give rise to the polymath who can quickly adapt to emerging technologies and navigate the AI-driven shift in the business landscape,” added Schulze.
“What’s even more important is possessing both hard and soft skills to complement the strengths of and reliance on AI systems. In fact, an Alteryx survey found that IT decision makers cited creativity, emotion/relatability, and critical thinking as the top three traits humans will provide, while expecting machines to deliver on complex problem solving, accuracy, and speed.”
Meanwhile, more organizations are eager to unlock the potential of generative AI to capture market share from their direct competitors and expand into adjacent markets. “We recently surveyed data leaders globally and found that one of their top main drivers for adopting generative AI was to predict business performance and industry trends,” said Vittal. To unlock these broad benefits and productivity gains from Generative AI, enterprises will need to advance their governance frameworks.
“Executive buyers understand how ungoverned deployment of Generative AI can damage their organization and reputation. Unsurprisingly, the top two reasons for not yet implementing generative AI came down to data privacy concerns and lack of trust in generative AI results,” said Vittal. “Therefore, any governance framework must give executive buyers confidence that it can effectively manage the risks associated with the AI applications, including their embedded LLMs, the end users of those applications, and the exchanges between the first two.”
We’ll also see AI adoption push companies toward a cloud-smart approach. According to Vittal, “The AI wave will create new data interaction paradigms-especially in the cloud. As more data becomes available and new AI use cases arise, systems will require more computing power to process this data, making a cloud-smart, hybrid approach more attractive than going all-in on the cloud.”
Schulze added, “As organizations continue to adopt hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, data management solutions that seamlessly operate across various cloud platforms will become essential. Data orchestration and integration across clouds will be a focus.”
Finally, robust governance frameworks and hybrid infrastructures will put enterprises in a good spot to democratize analytics and AI – a trend that more organizations will bring to reality in 2024. According to Schulze, “Organizations will continue to push for data and analytics democratization, making data and analytics tools more accessible to non-technical users across all areas of business.”
Vittal also stressed the importance of involving every employee in the analytics process. “Analytics is a team sport. And like every sport, we’ll see organizations seek platforms that allow each player to harness their strengths by giving flexibility to various professionals in various roles across the business.
“This will give rise to multi-modal interfaces that empower every user in the analytics value chain to engage with data intuitively and successfully based on their role – all while increasing collaboration across the decision-making process.”
The result? A winning formula for every organization.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suresh Vittal is the chief product officer (CPO) of Alteryx and is responsible for the strategic vision of Alteryx’s leading analytics and data science innovation. Suresh leads the Product Management, Engineering and Development organizations, playing a critical role in the company’s cloud, data science and analytics automation product strategy. His experience driving cloud transformation for leading software companies is helping Alteryx make machine learning and artificial intelligence easily accessible to citizen users.
Alteryx’s Chief Information Officer, Trevor Schulze leads the global IT team in delivering a comprehensive, business-led technology services and solutions portfolio. He works to inspire global teams to envision and execute creative solutions to difficult business problems and successfully capitalize on new market opportunities. His focus is on transforming businesses through innovative operational and technology initiatives and bringing award-winning products to market.
