How AI reshapes the IT industry will be 'fast and dramatic'

metamorworks/Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape the IT industry and the way businesses operate. That new forecast comes from market intelligence firm IDC, which predicts that enterprise spending on generative AI (GenAI) from now through 2027 will be 13 times greater than the growth rate for overall worldwide IT spending.

• Establish a Responsible AI Policy: This must include defined principles around fairness, transparency, protections, and accountability relating to the data used to train models, as well as how the results are used. A responsible AI policy should also provide transparency on the roles and responsibilities of developers, users, and other stakeholders, while addressing legal and compliance issues.

• Build an AI Strategy and Road Map: A set of defined, measurable, and prioritized GenAI use cases is required to align the organization on the key areas that will deliver the maximum business impact in the short, medium, and long term.

• Design an Intelligence Architecture: Managing the life cycle and governance of data, models, and business context for every use case is critical. The architecture should also include protocols for data privacy, security, and intellectual property protection.

• Reskill and Train Staff: New competencies will be required to build and use GenAI models, such as prompt engineers to write and test prompts for GenAI systems. Every organization must create a new skills map for core AI technologies and business capabilities to deploy GenAI at scale across the organization. Organizations should also build personalized training programs for key roles.

Enterprises will leverage generative AI and automation technologies to drive $1T in productivity gains by 2026. —IDC

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 12, 2023

The next step in defining the path to GenAI impact is prioritizing an identified set of use cases. IDC defines a use case as a business-funded initiative enabled by technology that delivers a measurable outcome. There are three broad types of GenAI use cases that need to be assessed:

• Industry: These involve more custom work and, in some cases, may require organizations to build their own GenAI models. Examples include generative drug discovery in life sciences and generative material design for manufacturing. Specialized use cases tend to be built around specific models and model providers, with custom integration architectures designed for individual clients.

• Business Function: These use cases typically involve integrating a model (or multiple models) with corporate data for use by specific departments or business functions, such as Marketing, Sales, and Procurement. Many organizations are already testing these types of use cases but are concerned about intellectual property leakage and data governance.

• Productivity: These use cases are aligned with work tasks, such as summarizing reports, creating job descriptions, or generating Java code. GenAI functionality for productivity improvement is being infused into existing applications, such as Microsoft 360 Copilot or Duet AI for Google. For many of these use cases, business value can be delivered through the content and data that the underlying foundation models have been pre-trained on.

IDC recommends adopting a "three horizons" framework to help organizations transform their business models using GenAI. 

• Horizon 1 focuses on near-term, incremental innovation.
• Horizon 2 focuses on disruptive innovation in the medium term.
• Horizon 3 focuses on long-term business model transformation.

The framework drives alignment across all business domains and helps prioritize key initiatives.

Enterprise 2023 per @IDC:
• only 12% of enterprises connect customer data between departments
• 42% of enterprises have underutilized data - move from data generation to decision velocity
• 42% of core IT spending is cloud (shift from cloud first to cloud economics) #CNX23 pic.twitter.com/LSx6bUwXJh

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) June 8, 2023

IDC's predictions for 2024 are largely centered around the emergence of AI as a major inflection point in the technology industry. "Every IT provider will incorporate AI into the core of their business, investing treasure, brain power, and time," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.  Here are IDC's 2024 top ten worldwide IT industry predictions:

AI in 2023: A year of breakthroughs that left no human thing unchanged These are the jobs most likely to be taken over by AI AI at the edge: 5G and the Internet of Things see fast times ahead Almost half of tech executives say their organizations aren't ready for AI or other advanced initiatives AI in 2023: A year of breakthroughs that left no human thing unchanged

These are the jobs most likely to be taken over by AI

AI at the edge: 5G and the Internet of Things see fast times ahead

Almost half of tech executives say their organizations aren't ready for AI or other advanced initiatives

Editorial standards Show Comments