By Thomas Lai
In the complimentary “Gartner® Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024,” Gartner shares recommendations for IT leaders and other executives planning their mid- and long-term strategy for technology innovation.
“Technology disruptions and socioeconomic uncertainties require a willingness to act boldly and strategically enhance resilience over ad hoc responses,” Gartner wrote. “IT leaders must ensure calculated risk and reliable investments to sustainably enable both internal and external value creation.”
As Gartner is a company that delivers actionable, objective insight to its executive and their teams, we believe that this report is well worth your time.
We’re also here to help you in budgeting your time for reading the report. In this blog, we’ll touch on some of our key takeaways, point out areas where we believe Boomi’s vision of integration and automation aligns with the insights in the Gartner report, and provide a complimentary link to the full report.
Technology Trends Are Interconnected
Gartner notes that its list isn’t ranked in order of importance because the trends are interconnected. Also, their importance to any organization will vary depending on industry, organizational maturity, business needs, and previously devised strategic plans.
Gartner has grouped the trends into three thematic groups: Protect Your Investment, Rise of the Builders, and Deliver the Value.
AI Trust, Risk and Security Management falls under the theme ‘Protect Your Investment’ in the report. Gartner includes Democratized Generative AI and AI-Augmented Development as two of the six trends in the ‘Rise of the Builders’ theme. This theme is about unleashing creative powers by using the appropriate technology for the appropriate functions. In the ‘Deliver the Value’ theme, Gartner recommends to continuously adjust to changing internal and external customer demands, creating a virtuous cycle of value determination and delivery. Intelligent applications help with the needed dynamics and operationalize the intelligence to further facilitate the augmented connected workforce.
At Boomi, these topics are top of mind. Our platform’s overall security routinely is rated by independent evaluators among the industry’s best, and our compliance, governance, and audit certifications lead the market with constant enhancements. Also, the new Boomi AI suite (more on that in a moment) is powered by an in-house, proprietary large language model that ensures security and accuracy for customers.
It’s true that every vendor has leaped aboard the “AI train,” and all businesses are searching for ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into their operations to increase efficiency and speed.
That idea is a North Star at Boomi. In our view, the real value of AI is to provide ease of use that enables business professionals, who might not have deep technical prowess, to accomplish more – on their own and without constant assistance from IT. That means giving them a simple conversational tool that abstracts away the behind-the-scenes technical complexity.
“We’ve trained this large language model about how to use Boomi and what are all the possibilities when you type in, ‘Create a lead-to-cash process, go!'” Boomi CEO Steve Lucas said in an interview discussing Boomi AI at Boomi World Tour Silicon Valley. “Boomi AI is not just going to say, ‘Here’s one recipe that a guy wrote.’ It will actually give you options based on real-world scenarios coming from anonymized data. It’s a game-changer to discover and use new process options in real time.”
The fundamental design of the Boomi platform helps businesses better incorporate new technology into their processes. All businesses strive for “digital transformation.” Yet an unintended consequence of that effort often is creating digital fragmentation when new applications don’t work together. When those systems are connected and enabled to automate processes, real transformation happens. Businesses can see improved productivity, enhanced employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, happier customers.
The Rise of the Machine Customer
Gartner recommends businesses include approaches for algorithm-based customers, noting that the customer landscape will change to include machine customers. The report further shares:
- By 2027, more than 50% of sales and service centers will be fielding calls from machine customers
- By 2028, machine customers will render 20% of digital storefronts obsolete
- By 2028, a machine customer will earn the Customer of the Year award at a global enterprise
- By 2028, economists will recognize machine customers as a GDP growth factor
A machine customer as Customer of the Year? Now that, we believe is future-focused.
So, just what is a machine customer? It’s exactly what the name suggests. Again, quoting from the report: “Machine customers are nonhuman economic actors that purchase goods and services in exchange for payment. By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years. This growth trend, augmented by GenAI, will impact trillions of dollars in purchases and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce.”
Certainly, for the enterprise C-Suite, machine customers present an “are you going to ride this wave or be wiped out by it” moment.
Boomi’s perspective is that none of us can say with any assurance of what’s coming. (Just think about OpenAI’s stunning announcement in November, 2022 about ChatGPT.) But what you can do is future-proof your business by assuring that whatever does come next, you can quickly and easily incorporate it into your operation. That requires an integration tool that can connect systems, processes, data, people, and things.
Like, maybe, machine customers.
To learn about and determine the importance of all these trends to your organization, you can find a link to the full report here.
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1. Gartner® Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024, Bart Willemsen, Gary Olliffe, Arun Chandrasekaran, 16 October 2023