2024: Tech Trends, AI, Cyber Crime and More

Demystifying AI

AI is unavoidable. It’s used in supply chains across industries and sectors, and it’s only going to increase. Microsoft see AI as the paradigm shift in human computer interaction and they’re probably right.

There’s still a lot of hype around AI, especially generative AI (tools such as ChatGPT) and the fear of missing out can be quite high, but there’s also a lot of to think about around its adoption, risks, and how those benefits are realised in practice. As we’re seeing a broader adoption of AI, 2024 will be the year of understanding:

The actual business problems and opportunities

Finding out what it can do for us as businesses is going to be huge and finding more tangible responses to ‘We need AI’, other than ‘What for?’ will get easier this year as people become more familiar with its strengths and limitations.

The true cost and ROI

They can be very expensive to run, there’s no doubt about that. With more options being developed and widely used, we’re going to be in a stronger position to understand the true cost, use and therefore ROI.

The limits of current GenAI

The main AI hype is around Generative AI – it’s not always the right solution to the problem, and it can’t solve everything, regardless of how much you want it to. They will continue to evolve, but we will start to see other AI solutions gain more traction.

How ‘normal’ businesses can adopt AI

AI is mainly the domain of big businesses – for example, Microsoft’s Copilot is only available for organisations with over 300 users, and that can afford to drop over $200,000 per year on this alone. Most businesses aren’t there, so we’ll start to see how more SMEs use AI to support their organisations.

AI built-in by default

Coupled with this, expect to see your business systems start releasing their own AI powered functionality built-in, particularly in SaaS solutions (and if they aren’t, you should probably ask them ‘why not?’).

Sustainability awareness

The cost to our environment is not to be ignored or forgotten. For example, the carbon emissions generated and water consumption that powers these models; the cost isn’t only financial.

Our options beyond ‘large language models’

All the elements above will lead us to question ‘what are the other options?’. For a specific purpose, a small language model may be far more cost effective to deliver for example.

Find out more about AI and how it can support your business, systems and team, or organise an innovation workshop, by getting in touch with our Innovation team.

Cyber crime will continue to be a huge challenge

An unfortunate reality, cyber security will continue to be something to work on and keep making progress in.

• The minimum standard will continue to develop

If you don’t have Next-Gen AV or EDR yet, get it. This will become a necessity for all organisations – as important as the tooling is, consider how it is monitored. A 24x7 MDR or SOC service is also important to consider.

Similarly with multi-factor authorisation (MFA); although an important tool to prevent identities being compromised, threat actors are finding ways to breach even these, so looking at modern authentication options such as FIDO2 and password-less technologies such as fingerprints or facial recognition for device and system security is vital – particularly for your most sensitive systems.

• Cloud security will need more focus

As more data is stored in the cloud, threat actors are finding more and more ways to infiltrate and compromise it so securing it is more important than ever – from proactive data classification and protection, to improving monitoring and auditing of user activity to detect any issues.

• Zero trust becomes more accessible

Zero trust has been making a lot of noise in the past few years, although it’s not a particularly new concept. It is now more easily adoptable by businesses of all sizes as it becomes better understood, and technologies become cheaper to licence and implement.

Find out more about the ongoing cyber threat landscape through our monthly report – sign up here.

Australian Cyber Security Strategy & Upcoming Legislation  A note from our AU Head of Cyber - Chris Pallister

It goes without saying that the newly introduced National Cyber Security Strategy is going have significant impact across business and industry across the country in 2024. We expect to see new standards, regulations and of course legislation introduced. With these new overwhelming pieces of information coming out, we are committed to ensuring all organisations are well prepared. We are keeping our ears close to the ground on the new introductions and will keep all current and new clients updated with our findings and recommendations.