Forrester

After three years dedicated to Forrester’s emerging technology portfolio, I’m excited to embark on a new chapter as VP of emerging technology and principal analyst. In this role, I’ll be focusing much of my time on researching the transformative impact of artificial intelligence as part of Forrester’s new Data, AI & Analytics service. While AI has been a part of my research, this transition allows me to dedicate more focus to helping clients generate real, measurable value from their AI investments. AI Computing: A New Era Of Human Empowerment A pivotal moment in my work came with the publication of Forrester’s landmark report, Change the Interface; Change the World, in which we lay out how AI will reshape the world over the next 20 years. This report is not just a statement on technology’s future; it also marks the beginning of a new era of human empowerment, where interfaces recognize human intention and agents work autonomously on our behalf. Together with my colleague Ted Schadler, I will soon release a follow-up report on the investment strategies that companies must embrace to thrive in the era of AI computing. This work will provide actionable insights to help organizations align their investments with future innovations. Cutting Through The AI Fog With Value Management The AI landscape is full of potential, but it’s also overwhelming. New technologies emerge almost daily, leaving business leaders wondering, Am I doing enough? Did I make the right investments? This flood of information can lead to confusion — what I call the “AI fog.” Cutting through this is critical for staying competitive in this new era of AI computing, and the key lies in AI value management. My early research shows that firms taking a more structured approach tend to grow faster. But many organizations still struggle to quantify AI’s impact on business outcomes. My upcoming research will explore what drives the growth of leaders and how firms can replicate it. My goal is to provide frameworks to assess the total picture of AI benefits, costs, and risks, helping firms develop this deep understanding. Pushing Research Boundaries On AI And Quantum Computing Tech Beyond AI computing and value, I will continue leading Forrester’s research at the frontier of AI technologies. My focus includes studying AI agents and their progression toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). This research will provide insight into the short-, medium-, and long-term implications of AGI — a future in which AI systems can perform any intellectual tasks that were once reserved only for humans, raising important questions about AI safety and ethics. Although my primary focus is now on AI, I will continue tracking quantum computing, a technology I’ve been researching for over a decade. I will help firms understand how quantum computing will move from theory to practical applications, ensuring that they are prepared for its potential disruptions. Continuing To Lead Emerging Technology Research I will also continue to lead Forrester’s emerging technology research, a critical area that helps organizations stay ahead of disruptive innovation. Over the past three years, we’ve developed a dedicated portfolio of reports on the top 10 and next 10 emerging technologies. To make this research more accessible, we’ve launched an emerging technology hub for Forrester Decisions clients. Additionally, we’ve collaborated with our internal generative AI team to enhance our AI-driven insights. Our genAI-powered assistant, Izola, is now available in beta, designed to help clients explore emerging technology use cases and trends. Looking ahead, my goal is to continue supporting the emerging technology process, publish our flagship “top emerging technologies” reports this summer, and collaborate with our team to innovate digital experiences, including enhancing genAI capabilities. Let’s Connect As I transition into this new role, I’m excited to continue delivering insights that help our clients navigate the technological shifts shaping the future. Clients, consider scheduling a guidance session or inquiry with me to discuss any of these research areas and what I’m learning along the way. Clients and nonclients alike, I’m always eager to hear compelling stories from firms. Please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or contact your Forrester account representative. source

Selecting the right partner can be the difference between success and failure for technology-driven initiatives. Businesses and institutions make dozens or hundreds of technology and service provider selections every year. Most don’t follow a rigorous process or involve all the right people in the decision. Many go with an old standby rather than canvas the field for a provider with the right capabilities, cultural fit, and technology ecosystem. To help, Forrester has integrated its extensive portfolio of research and best practices for technology leadership clients into a new solution blueprint to select the best partner for you. This blueprint draws on our extensive best practices and our tons of experience in advising clients with their partner selection initiatives — and of course, the hundreds of Forrester Landscape reports and Forrester Wave™ evaluations that augment that expertise. This blueprint will help you assemble the right team, follow the right process, narrow the provider options, and begin the contracting process. The process includes four steps: Establish a multistakeholder agreement for the selection process. After following the three activities in this step, the selection strategy, team, and business case are ready to go. Build a plan to choose the right provider. After completing the activities in this step, your selection process is laid out, with clear steps, templates, and processes. Choose a shortlist of providers to assess. After this step, the RFP is complete, and you are ready to send it out to a shortlist of providers. Assess providers and make a first choice. The three activities in this step help you score the responses, make a choice, and propose a candidate. You are ready to review, confirm, and begin negotiating the contract. Forrester clients can use the selection blueprint on their own; they can engage Forrester analysts in a guidance journey to make the right selection with the help of our subject matter experts; and they can accelerate their process with the help of Forrester Consulting. Don’t hesitate to reach out if we can help! source

Collaboration as reality, not just lip service. Viewing change as part of the journey, not a troublesome detour. Powering technology with the right people, processes, and data. When Senior Analyst Su Doyle and I reviewed Forrester’s State Of Customer Obsession Survey, 2024, we found a thread connecting B2B companies that reach the highest level of customer obsession: They commit to putting the vision into action and never stop. Companies that attain the highest level of customer obsession have better growth, better retention, and better employee engagement than their non-customer-obsessed peers. You can learn from them, and it doesn’t have to happen all at once. In fact, while customer obsession remains a high bar on our continuum, with 3% of companies reaching that top level, the segment right behind it, customer-committed, grew considerably in this year’s survey, from 36% to 57%. Progress is clearly possible. But how? Centering leadership, strategy, and operations around your customer isn’t a quick win. But it’s a worthy one. Companies see plenty of milestones and gains along the way. We found that firms in the customer-obsessed segment are more likely to: Treat customer obsession as an investment. Customer obsession is a perpetual business orientation that requires the right resources, applied consistently and adjusted when necessary. For example, publishing firm Elsevier stays flexible by setting aside budget to fund squads that will uncover and deliver new products separate from existing iterations. Make change a constant, not a special event. Moving from a company-only focus to an expanded view of value for the company and the customer requires an appetite for change. Companies in the customer-obsessed segment remove barriers that limit employees’ permission to use their best judgment, whereas just 71% of the non-customer-obsessed group do the same. Take advantage of the CX toolkit. The right technology is crucial, as are the right people, processes, and data. All should work in harmony; none should be sidelined. Rabobank mapped dozens of customer journeys, then ensured that customer journey managers and service designers worked closely with data analysts, web managers, call center staff, technology teams, and other lines of business to manage them. Lead with courage and humility. Leaders at customer-obsessed firms adhere to strong convictions and seek the right internal and external partners to help, confirm, or redirect. All the companies in the customer-obsessed group indicated that senior executives at their firms recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, compared to 72% of the non-customer-obsessed group. Make silos an uncomfortable exception. Companies in the customer-obsessed group encourage, even mandate, collaboration. This means real support for cross-functional alignment around customer value, ensuring that brand, customer, and employee experiences are consistent, and showing employees how their daily work and KPIs match the company’s mission. Read the full report, The State Of Customer Obsession In B2B, 2024 (Forrester client access only), for more data and examples of companies taking action on customer obsession. Reach out to an expert to explore your own journey toward customer obsession. source

The Forrester Enterprise Architecture Awards has been the only global awards program dedicated to recognizing excellence in enterprise architecture since 2010. We continue our partnership with The Open Group to co-judge the EA Awards this year and are delighted to announce that the EA Awards program for 2024 is in full swing. Enterprise architecture (EA) has evolved from a group plagued by ivory-tower thinking to a pragmatic discipline that drives business outcomes with measurable value. Effective EA begins with six priorities: It must be valuable to the business; accountable for the outcomes it promises to deliver; influential in order to have an impact while empowering team autonomy; collaborative to build trust and partnership; agile to keep pace with change; and innovative to steer toward the future. We congratulate Contact Energy, this year’s winner, and finalists Bank of Singapore and FWD Group. They all demonstrate how excellent EA practices contribute to the high performance of their business and drive both internal and external value. Winner: Contact Energy Contact Energy, a New Zealand electricity generator and retailer providing energy, broadband, and mobile services, embarked on a new transformation and growth journey to drive the decarbonization of New Zealand for a renewable energy future. In the past few years, Contact has succeeded in transforming its retail, corporate, and generation businesses. A superior EA foundation, a strategic pillar of its technology strategy, has been a key enabler for Contact to achieve its enterprise transformation objectives and deliver business outcomes. As part of Contact’s digital transformation, EA plays a crucial role in: Managing risks through seamless business collaboration. Contact worked closely with the business to address key risks. Representative initiatives include identifying and treating the latest and most significant cybersecurity risks, the upgrade of risk and management of change solutions, the amendment of information and data policy to include AI, proactive management of IT asset lifecycle information, an information and knowledge management program, and a digital solution architecture aligned to EA principles. Driving cost reduction through migration, optimization, and modernization. Contact’s EA approach also focused on maximizing technology efficiency, highlighting the substantial benefits of cloud migration. Through the SAP cloud optimization program, the company cut infrastructure costs by over $1.3 million using several targeted methods. Additionally, automating system test execution, replacing outdated platforms with modern iPaaS solutions, and consolidating systems are expected to drive further cost reductions in the near future. Improving customer and employee experiences through architecture principles. Contact prioritizes usability and interoperability as core architecture principles. The move to a new risk management platform and subsequent launch of a health and safety management mobile app empowered users to submit observations directly from their phones, resulting in a 50% increase in submissions within the first year. Additionally, the ERP upgrade enabled mobile access to applications from any location, while enhancements to core networks and infrastructure ensured seamless connectivity across all generation sites. Increasing revenue through EA co-design. Contact identified several opportunities, or pain points, and created initiative briefs to address them. For example, transforming from spreadsheets and manual processes to a modern automated platform for its trading business led to a revenue increase of $221,000 in Q4 FY’24, and the adoption of digital engineering improved data and documentation for operationalization and decision-making. Finalist: Bank of Singapore Bank of Singapore (BOS) is a wholly owned private banking arm of OCBC, the longest-established Singapore bank and the second-largest financial services group in Southeast Asia by assets, and it offers wealth management services to wealthy individuals, families, and financial intermediaries worldwide. The EA practice of BOS is the cornerstone of its digital transformation journey, driving significant business outcomes across multiple dimensions and aligning closely with its business and tech leaders to meet challenges. BOS scored the highest in the AI bonus category. BOS’s EA practice focuses on the following practices: Contributing to revenue growth through architecture transformation. EA adopted API-first open architecture and created new revenue streams through partnerships with financial intermediaries, contributing to an overall increase in nontraditional revenue. It also led transformation of the Group Wealth Platform. In addition, its enterprise data architecture drives decision-making, improving investment performance by a significant amount, and the implementation of a modular, composable digital-core architecture leveraging group platforms for agile product development and governance reduced time to market for new products. Driving cost savings through rationalization and modernization. The EA practice consolidated its application portfolio after a systematic review, resulting in annual cost savings. It also guided BOS’s hybrid multicloud strategy, which enabled improved application scalability and performance, as well as promoted technological innovation. The reusable microservices and APIs also reduced development time and costs for new projects. Managing risks through comprehensive EA-led frameworks. The EA team not only implemented a robust enterprise architecture framework governed tightly by its Architecture Review Committee, but it also developed a “compliance by design” approach, integrating Zero Trust into architectural blueprints. In addition, EA established a comprehensive vendor assessment framework to reduce its exposure to third-party risks and a “build vs. buy” framework to make informed decisions about technology solutions with careful evaluation of specific needs, resources, and goals. Enhancing CX and employee satisfaction through architected tech adoption. The EA team architected an omnichannel platform with improved customer experience (CX) in the bank’s Digital Services and Relationship Manager front-end application. In addition, the EA team designed and launched an internal OCBC GPT (generative AI) chatbot that improved productivity by up to 50% for daily tasks, a first for a local bank in Singapore. Finalist: FWD Group FWD Group (FWD) is a Pan-Asian life and health insurance business with more than 12 million customers across 10 markets. FWD not only adopted a customer-led strategy designed to champion customer needs and create a desirable customer journey but also built a standardized digital architecture across the group, powered by cloud-based data analytics and technology. FWD’s Group EA team is a crucial component across all technological and digital operations, acting as the pivotal link between business objectives and technological execution. In this year’s EA Awards, FWD scored the

I just completed over seven months of research on the subject of sales and marketing alignment in B2B organizations with my colleague Rick Bradberry, and we uncovered some huge concerns that amount to a precarious future for alignment between these two functions. Our research found high perceptions of alignment but a low degree of actual alignment. We heard quite a few tales of trust, respect, and coordination, and we heard just as many tales of friction, exclusion, credit-stealing, slandering, name-calling, and undermining. So What’s The Truth About Sales And Marketing Alignment? Ultimately, we uncovered three hard truths about alignment that marketing and sales leaders must face as soon as possible to avoid an inevitable derailment in the near future: Truth #1: Sales and marketing are not aligned, even though most leaders think that they are. We found that C-suite executives have sky-high perceptions of alignment (for example, Forrester’s Priorities Survey, 2024, found that an astounding 82% of C-level B2B business and technology professionals say that their product, sales, and marketing teams are aligned, with 41% describing those teams as highly aligned). But Forrester’s Q2 2024 Sales And Marketing Alignment Survey found that 65% of sales and marketing professionals believe there is a lack of alignment between the sales and marketing leaders in their organizations. Our research also found a significant lack of communication, teamwork, trust, and other needed qualities for true alignment. Truth #2: Traditional sales and marketing alignment is going to be derailed due to mounting pressures. The landscape of B2B marketing and sales is being reshaped by technological advancements, changing buyer behaviors, and evolving business models. Traditional alignment efforts are being challenged by these external forces, threatening to exacerbate existing dysfunctions and introduce new ones. Truth #3: The future of sales and marketing alignment is not alignment. Our research unveiled four future paradigms (siloed, assimilated, subservient, and proportionate) that will govern the relationship between marketing and sales functions within B2B organizations. Each of the paradigms have pros and cons. Sales and marketing leaders should consider deliberately choosing among the paradigms, or else they will find themselves losing control over them. Get The New Report And Start Improving Your Partnership Between Sales And Marketing If you are a Forrester client, you can read the full report, The Future Of Marketing And Sales Alignment, and schedule a guidance session to discuss your plans to build a customer-obsessed partnership between marketing and sales in your organization. source

Last week, Visa announced the acquisition of Featurespace, a UK-based enterprise fraud management and anti-money-laundering (AML) vendor. Forrester estimates the acquisition price to be between $350–450 million. Founded in 2008, Featurespace employs over 400 people. The move comes as a bit of surprise, since Visa’s Cybersource solution already addresses e-commerce and retail fraud management/digital fraud management use cases. Cybersource has been using rules and machine learning-based models for risk scoring and has extensive alert and case routing and investigation features. This means the Featurespace acquisition brings in significantly overlapping technology for Visa. Forrester expects that the success of the acquisition will depend on the following factors, namely Visa’s ability and execution to: Converge the Cybersource and Featurespace solutions’ intellectual property. While it may look viable to maintain two separate technology stacks in the two portfolios, this means duplicating engineering, marketing, and sales efforts, which is not efficient and can result in the erosion of Visa’s competitive position against other fraud management and AML vendors. Provide convincing fraud management and AML cyber/online and transaction monitoring capabilities. Cybersource has focused on detecting merchant-side payment transaction fraud (e.g., fraudsters using stolen credit card numbers on a merchant’s website or fraudsters taking over legitimate users’ online accounts on e-commerce websites), while Featurespace has specialized in detecting issuer bank-side payment fraud and offering some cyber/online (account takeover, fraudulent registration) fraud detection capabilities. Featurespace has also entered the AML space, with a focus on transaction monitoring. Visa, with its Featurespace acquisition, needs to assemble its assets to offer end-to-end (i.e., cyber/online and transaction monitoring) fraud management that covers scams, new account fraud, and peer-to-peer payments. Offer bank/issuer-facing and e-commerce-facing fraud management tools. Fraud management is still an industry-specific product market. Vendors increasingly provide more than just risk-scoring rule management and machine learning; alert and case management; and reporting capabilities for fraud management but also bring in a wealth of fraud domain-level knowledge (i.e., models trained to detect typical fraud patterns such as account takeover, excessive payments, mule activities, or scams), especially given today’s transition from on-premises to SaaS-delivered fraud management solutions. Consequently, Visa needs to use its access to payment network, issuer (Featurespace), and merchant-side (Cybersource) data to provide powerful solutions to issuers/banks and e-commerce verticals. Fraud management continues to be a rapidly evolving market. I recommend reading my evaluation, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Fraud Management Solutions, Q2 2024, or scheduling a guidance session or inquiry with me to discuss the current state of fraud management. source

In 2024, regulators around the globe introduced a myriad of proposed cybersecurity- and privacy-focused policies and legislation to better manage emerging risks relating to emerging technologies such as generative AI (genAI), as well as those related to managing third-party relationships. Security and risk leaders sprinted to secure genAI, even as its use cases were still evolving; almost every industry experienced critical IT disruptions due to lack of resilience planning; and despite downplaying third-party risks, organizations globally saw an increase in software supply chain breaches. With cybercrime expected to cost $12 trillion in 2025, regulators will take a more active role in protecting consumer data while organizations pivot to adopt more proactive security measures to limit material impacts. This year’s cybersecurity, risk, and privacy predictions from Forrester for 2025 reflect how organizations need to evolve to address these emerging risk domains. Here are three of those predictions: CISOs will deprioritize genAI use by 10% due to lack of quantifiable value. According to Forrester’s 2024 data, 35% of global CISOs and CIOs consider exploring and deploying use cases for genAI to improve employee productivity as a top priority. The security product market has been quick to hype genAI’s expected productivity benefits, but a lack of practical outcomes is fostering disillusionment. The thought of an autonomous security operations center using genAI generated a lot of hype, but it couldn’t be further from reality. In 2025, the trend will continue, and security practitioners will sink deeper into disenchantment as challenges such as inadequate budgets and unrealized AI benefits reduce the number of security-focused genAI deployments. Breach-related class-action costs will surpass regulatory fines by 50%. Breach-related spending is no longer limited to regulatory fines and remediation costs. Historically, cyber regulations have not gone far enough to protect customers and employees — causing these same people to pursue class-action lawsuits and seek damages. Class-action costs are enormous in data breach litigations. And with the percentage of companies facing class actions at a 13-year high, CISOs will be asked to contribute toward the company’s class-action defense fund in 2025, making costs from class actions greatly exceed fines imposed by regulators. A Western government will bar specific third-party or open-source software. Software supply chain attacks are a top culprit for data breaches in organizations globally. Growing pressure from Western governments to require private companies to produce software bills of materials (SBOMs) has been a boon for software component transparency, but these SBOMs highlight the role of third-party and open-source software in the products that governments purchase. In 2025, a government armed with this information will restrict an open-source component on the grounds of national security. To comply, software suppliers will need to remove the offending component and replace the functionality. Forrester clients can read the full Predictions 2025: Cybersecurity, Risk, And Privacy report to get more detail about these predictions as well as two additional predictions related to the EU AI Act and internet-of-things device security. You can also register for the upcoming client webinar. If you aren’t a client, sign up here to receive our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top predictions for 2025, when it becomes available later this month. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

I have several friends who are public-school teachers. As with many teachers, they love the core mission of education but get frustrated by the administrative aspects of their jobs. Two of the most cumbersome are frequent changes in curriculum and state teaching standards. Customer experience (CX) leaders face a similar challenge. In recognition of CX Day 2024, Bain & Company, in collaboration with Kantar and Qualtrics, released a new set of global standards for customer experience teams. The goal is to create a common set of guidelines to help CX teams address their attribution and influence challenges. It’s a laudable goal. But the standards fall short of providing CX leaders with the direction they need to attain that goal. The good news is that the new standards do not significantly diverge from what CX professionals are likely already familiar with. Forrester has long offered to its CX clients an assessment tool to evaluate their function’s maturity. Many of that tool’s statements mirror the characteristics now espoused by the newly published global standards. Similarly, content and courses offered by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) center around its CXPA CX Framework, which includes categories such as CX strategy, customer understanding, design, metrics, measurement, culture, and accountability. On the other hand, on their own, no standards will dramatically improve CX leaders’ impact and influence. Our research shows that CX leaders continue to struggle with showing impact and ROI. What CX professionals really need to do is find a common language and approach that’s shared by stakeholders across their organization, like talking about ROI in CFO terms and CX initiatives in agile or project management office speak. CX leaders can also align their work with existing standards that their stakeholders already follow. For example, ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) publishes a set of voluntary standards for service excellence that cover key topics like design thinking, cocreation, and journey mapping. Similarly, many organizations follow ISACA’s CMMI maturity models to improve business performance. While initially created for software engineering, the models expanded to help organizations in any industry evaluate their current levels of capability and performance and offer a guide to optimize business results. I’m not advocating for a move away from existing or new CX standards. Instead, I’m suggesting that CX leaders try to integrate their work with standards that have already been adopted across their enterprises to help them better collaborate with their business partners. So what action should you take with this new set of standards proposed by Bain, Kantar, and Qualtrics? Definitely read them, especially if you are new to your role and need guidance for kicking off your CX transformation. If you are already following a path toward CX maturity, chances are you will find little that is new. You might find some additional standards to help strengthen your position but not enough to warrant a wide-scale shift in your approach. Instead of adopting a new set of standards that continue to focus too inwardly, connect with what already works in your organization. Like our public-school teachers prefer, let’s stay the course and focus on implementation before seeking more change. To stay connected to these topics and my other research, go to my Forrester bio and choose “Follow.” To delve more into how to demonstrate impact and value, please schedule time to talk. source

What should your organization ask itself to determine whether retaining a tech vendor is the best move right now? We’re finding that some digital leaders, such as those in many B2C commerce organizations, are choosing to stay with the tech vendors that they already have in place. Why is that remarkable? It’s a shift from earlier years when they were more likely to be swept off their digital feet by other vendors’ promises of competitive ROI and sparkling innovation. Today, digital business leaders are instead prioritizing how they consolidate or reduce the software products in their ecosystems. One reason: Leaders who already have made the move to SaaS solutions often cannot justify the business case for replatforming. Plus, they don’t want incur the costs, disruption, and (inevitable) unexpected issues of a replacement project. But what if your current vendor isn’t innovating or providing the support that you feel your organization needs? To help determine whether your org is better off retaining your vendor or looking for a new solution, analyze your current vendor in light of the following questions: Can you — and your customers and employees — stomach the costs of staying put with your current vendor? Avoiding replatforming might seem less expensive because the transition itself brings inherent costs, but don’t discount the costs of staying with a vendor if you’re being left behind in terms of functionality that may create better customer and employee experiences. Think specifically about: The hard, direct costs of the current system. Analyze everything included: subscriptions, licensing, support, ongoing customizations, and potentially hosting. Factor in potential increases due to usage-based pricing, plus the costs of maintenance over time, as the solution ages. The hard, direct costs for a potential new vendor — plus the costs of the migration. These expenses may be recorded differently, but they’re still real costs of the change. Include training, potential new hires to bring in expertise, testing, and other costs of the transition. Whether your current solution will help you keep up with competitors. For each solution, analyze the impact on both customers and your employees. For example: Will you struggle to provide relevant search results and sacrifice conversion? Will customer experience suffer with poor post-purchase messaging and shipment tracking — and drive higher costs and volumes for customer care? Are competitors providing clear inventory availability in stores while you can’t? Will associates have a harder time fulfilling online orders for in-store pickup?   Are you getting enough of what you need from the current partnership? Culture fit is an often-overlooked factor in vendor selection and retention. You’ll know if it’s working. When it’s not, and if you’ve done all you can to communicate with your vendor about the relationship, it may be time to move on. Remember that: All strong vendors perpetually innovate. Do you receive inspiring new functionality from your vendor? Do you also feel that you have influence over its roadmap? Technology vendors in your ecosystem must be true partners to your organization. Is each of the vendors in your ecosystem an ally? What’s their history of delivering on promises and building trust with your teams? Is your organization able to work on improvements and innovative solutions alongside your partners? What does support look like, and is that working for your internal teams? If retention feels like a good fit for your organization and you want a strategy to “win” the renewal game, check out Forrester’s report, The Digital Leaders’ Guide To Acting As Your Own Tech Retention Advocate. For Forrester clients who want a buyers’ guide, please schedule an inquiry or guidance session with us here. (coauthored with Senior Research Associate Delilah Gonzalez) source

This year feels different. Global geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts are compelling businesses in the Asia Pacific region to adapt like never before. In our June forecast, we captured how tech spending in APAC is transforming in response to this evolving landscape. We discussed how enterprises across the region are embedding adaptivity into the core of their business processes and, naturally, their IT capabilities as they respond to an ever-changing world — and boy is the world changing! AI Sets Us On A New S-Curve AI remains the elephant in the room. Last year’s unbridled hype around large language models and generative AI has given way to more pragmatism. Around 75% of my client interactions thus far in 2024 have had at least some AI flavor. Engaging with generative AI has grown more sophisticated, enabling developers to move past simple techniques like prompting over public APIs. They’re now creating advanced generative AI applications using emerging techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI. This has allowed organizations to unlock a whole new range of use cases for generative AI, surpassing the first generation of prompt-based chatbots and embedding AI more deeply in business operations. Many of today’s tech leaders began their careers during a similarly transformative period: the rise of digital. Over the past two decades, a first wave of digital technologies reshaped industries, empowering early adopters to create unprecedented value for customers and shareholders. As digital became mainstream, however, its impact plateaued. Once a competitive advantage, digital innovation is now seen as a basic requirement. The explosive growth flattened from a hockey-stick trajectory to a steady S-curve. Now, a new inflection point is upon us. Emerging AI and automation technologies promise to redefine business value by making processes smarter and more autonomous. We are at the beginning of a fresh S-curve, poised for another era of exponential growth and transformative impact. You Need Adaptive IT Capabilities As companies ready themselves for these transformational changes, they need to ensure that their IT capabilities are adaptive. Today’s organizations are often caught up in a perpetual balancing act between managing the costs of legacy on one hand and setting themselves up for innovation and value creation on the other. Forrester’s high-performance IT framework offers a methodology for technology leaders to apply to manage the transition to AI-infused, autonomous IT capabilities while staying nimble and pragmatic. In my session at Technology & Innovation Summit APAC 2024, I will be talking about: The key characteristics of an adaptive mindset. How to ensure that your tech investments remain agile and responsive to business needs in times of radical change. Real-world examples of companies that have successfully adopted an adaptive mindset along their journey to AI-driven transformation. Join Us In Sydney! Don’t miss this opportunity to join me, my fabulous colleagues, and your executive peers at this event. Register now for Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC and take the first step toward transforming your business with the power of tech, talent, and AI. Reserve your place today and be part of a community that’s shaping the future of technology. For more details and to register, visit the event website. source