Business tech in 2024: 6 trends you can’t ignore | Ep. 125
it's time to look into the future it's not just about AI although it is a big part of 2024 will we still be looking at that technology and what are some of the other big technology trends that businesses will be adopting for the rest of the year next up on today and [Music] Tech hi everyone welcome to today in Tech I'm Keith Shaw joining me on the show today is Mike beckow he is the chief futurist and managing director at deoy Consulting welcome to the show Mike oh Keith thanks for having me man how does it how does one become a chief futurist is it is it do you start out in your career saying I'm GNA I'm just going to predict the future and because it's such a cool title oh gosh well thank you uh you know I you just had me thinking of an alternate timeline wherein I was you know the deputy under understudy futurist you know second second level but you know super straight talk I I my journey and I'm sure there there are different ones but uh I I was an inventor for about 12 years you know R&D Vibes us patents you know art of the possible uh after that I was an investor I worked as a venture capitalist for about eight years and nothing like putting your money where your mouth is to get a a handle on the difference between what's possible and what's profitable yeah so in many ways the the chief futurist work is sort of a third act that marries up the know the youthful exuberance and optimism of of that first career right with practical tactics of the second AKA of all this stuff that could happen what looks most likely given kind of Market Mojo and the rest right and the short answer is you know you make up the title and the market reacts and then it's too late to get in trouble with your boss I just think it's a cool title so um you know or or you know in my in my mind you become a futurist if you attend Hogwarts type of a a thing and you know you've got the magic behind you all right so the reason Wizardry for mles Wizardry for that's what I'm here for the reason we have you on the show today is that uh you guys came out with uh your Tech Trends report uh and this is now in the 15th year or is it the 16th it's one of those two um where where you guys have been identifying I think since 2008 2009 um so since then you know talk a little bit of the the creation of the report and you know have you changed the core methodology over the years um what what's different this year maybe than than in previous years about this whole report like you know why do you guys do it well Keith you know for starters one of the biggest tropes or cliches idioms you know pick your term but one of the biggest phrases in in the world of futures or foresight work is that the future is already here it's just not very evenly distributed okay now you know William Gibson Neuromancer 1980 Something we at deoe with our Tech Trends work we we take that surprisingly literally and and here's what I mean as you know 178 year old Global Professional Services firm one of the nice things about our our uh sort of situation if you will is that we're working with clients in just about every sector and just about every geography and so Keith what we've what we've learned over these 15 years is that there is somebody in some far-flung region far-flung sector building something that figures to be part of our tomorrow today and so in short we're not even predicting or or or making speculations on anything we take more of a journalistic approach we Chronicle little faces of the future being whipped up today somewhere right and if we have enough evidence points around those we can confident say hey this thing's got legs and it figures to become normal for the rest of us in the next 18 to 24 months right right right and um all right so when you look back at maybe some of the trends in your previous reports were there any areas that where you went and look back and go wow we you know we really missed the ball on that one um I I I I I can't imagine that you guys would ever admit that um and and more it would be more like well the world just wasn't ready for this yet or we thought it was going to happen it still may happen but you know the world needs to catch up um for for example for example you know um AR and VR was the was the big Topic in 2016 and and so now we're seeing this this come back in the in the 2024 report um like how do you how do you I don't even know how how do you say face I guess is is is the question or is is it not something that you guys look at yeah yeah you know it we absolutely acknowledge where we've gotten a little irrationally exuberant that's a good way to put it yeah it's across sectors with language but but you know I'll give you example eight nine years ago we we spilled a fair amount of ink talking about gamification yep and and in this idea that you know uh per per the Great Book reality is broken that if we could put you know meaningful milestones and and and laits and achievements and in professional work and we again we saw evidence that many of our clients were beginning to that we could begin to sort of measure and manage work in the professional space in in new and improved ways and that never really became the norm right at least not it at least it wasn't called gamification but but to your point sometimes the trend sits underneath the titling and so while gamification achievements and badging didn't necessarily become the new Norm you know what did lots of micro measurements lots of Dash and generally speaking the the digit digitization and management of of everything from you know what what calls did you hop on to to how much did you talk during them so sometimes it's the themes under the the wacka Doo titles that that actually matter more than the the point branding Well you aren't aren't you responsible for for some of the wacka do titles when you're writing the report or oh 100% yeah yeah all right 100% well again I mean that's that's just like with in journalism you know you have a a writer that writes a really long and detailed story and what most people pay attention to is the editor that slaps a headline in a subhead on there and whether that headline gets it or doesn't you know you want to get clicks and Views too just like everybody else it's so you you you know you you modify and tweak things a little bit Yeah Keith you know it there's this old great quote from um from Henry David thorough right didn't expect to hear about him today but here we are uh he said read not the times read the eternities and what he was really getting at was that you know buzzword you know Zeitgeist headlining has a way of stealing our attention from the IND in right and so you know to to your I think to your great Insight Keith you know from from one Communicator to another um the there there's a need to put an understandable rapper in veneer around these big amorphous Concepts hence the headlines hence things like reality online or what have you all right so we're gonna jump I want to jump into obviously this year's report I mean otherwise then what's the point of this whole video than just you and I talking about stuff um all right all right so one of the the key themes that came out was that you feel in 2024 that companies are going to start seeking a balance between and and again these are great words um shine on one side and substance on the other and to me when I was reading this it felt like you know is this a fancy way of saying that that companies should not be jumping on hyped Technologies as much as they may have in the past and obviously when I use the term hyped technology I think we we all know what what technology I'm talking about from 2023 so is is that is that part of if if you looked at the overall theme we're going to jump into some of the like the individual Trends but talk about you know how you figured out what the overall theme was going to be this year with this balance yeah so Keith you know one of the one of the things that we've we've recognized with with our deoe Tech Trends Work O over the last 15 years is that interesting movements can poporn up from just about anywhere but the ones that seem to have most purchase and traction with our clients tend to fit in these surprisingly enduring six buckets okay right now three three of those are think of it like the traditional it stack right you've got you've got interface you've got database and then you've got the number crunching place or the you know some would call it you know UI uh information compute um the other three they tend to be the business and people side of the shop right that old idea that culture or business eats you know tech for breakfast you've got cyber risk and Trust the the The Perennial notion that there's folks out to do us harm and then you've got maybe the the chin scratcher here um core modernization the recognition that these old rusty but trusty systems have to be dragged along the play nicely with all the future Rama and so in you know in determining or or or sort of intuiting that these six categories matter but there's always something new per category yeah really guides our fishing each year and so when we talk about Shine versus substance that inoculates us against all the snake oil because the tendency is to look at this stuff alak cart you say oh goodness it was metaverse but now it's gen right it's like no no no augmented virtual reality still has a place on the interaction layer and gen yeah very much has a place in the information layer but it's not one or the other right when you look at it individually it's like watching six-year-olds play soccer right you mob the ball you're gonna have a bad time when you pull you pull the lens back you say okay all six areas matter and you can't have the shiny stuff unless you've built it on a you kind of a stable Foundation of what some people might consider the boring stuff well well when you when you see one of these Trends whether it's a new technology or something that you might not have seen before do you then tend to say oh this new technology will fit in bucket a b c or you know four five six um yeah or you know it's almost like do you take that Trend and then say oh well it'll fit here or it'll fit here or has there ever been a case where you're like it's not fitting in any bucket and then what do we do then I don't know if you've ever experienced you know where as you've developed this you're like you know what everything does fit in one of six buckets so in the in the early days of our report it was fullon poer right we would talk with clients globally about what literally what's new what's next what's cooking and what what we would start to find is the stories that had the most purchase with not just the technology teams but the rest of the SE Suite the board and their customers they tended to coales around these six areas right right simpler interfaces smarter databases more performant you know compute um and and and around four years ago we made the editorial decision to sort of flip the script not to put the cart in front of the horse as it were but to say Hey listen a decade worth of input suggesting that these are the six ponds that matter most let's mostly lead with those ponds and so it it's really these days a report around these six topics now when something orthogonal you know comes down like alien life you know it descends on us we say okay here's a righteous opportunity for a prologue an epilogue or a new line of work Cas in point we put out a piece last June on Space technology right with a recognition that a growing wallet share at our clients is going towards things outside of it biotech space Tech energy Tech climate Tech and so that stuff we're all over it but we're recognizing that it's adjacent to core it okay okay all right so you do have a space in case the aliens land and and then you do we're ready ready for it and our robot overs all right so you know also then around these these buckets I also like calling them bubbles um you don't rank them in any format again we're going to go through them in a certain order only because I'm I'm just following the order that you guys wrote in the press release or in the report but just I I want the audience to understand that these are not we're not going like top Trend one two we're not ranking them um explain you know cuz then I was also thinking like you know would a company more likely gravitate towards one of these buckets or bubbles depending on what business they're in or is it some you know something completely different yeah definitely definitely not ranked it's it's not a top six okay it's really more of a hey y'all are likely facing these six areas of of Mind share and and investment and so let's talk about the things that feel most precient in each okay so let's jump in and so we're going to and again this is the the you I'm just going in the order that you guys have written it's uh the first the first big individual trend for 2024 was spatial Computing in the industrial metaverse and you guys write that augmented reality and VR are making headlines in the consumer space obviously like we're right in the middle of Apple um just launching this Vision Pro to um lots of lots of different opinions there um but the biggest impact you guys are saying is going to be in that industrial space where we're talking about technologies that aren't as exciting but still very relevant which is digital twins spatial simulation augmented work inst uh augmented work instructions um So within that Ro so talk a little bit about that but then I know have another follow-up question around um you have this neat term called a postscreen future so what what will that mean mean talk about some of the the trends within this industrial metaverse but then hit me up on what you mean by postscreen Future sure so Keith one of the you know one of the the things we've recognized in the human computer interaction space right is that we're living in an age that our our successors right our our our progyny would look back at and they might call it Peak screen okay and what I mean by that is you know if you think about it you I'm regularly with clients I say how many of y'all have a phone you know 100 hands go up how many you'all have two phones church and state and then you know another another you know 50% of hands go up and then you've got the projectors the screens in the lobby the confidence monitors our lived environment is literally overrun with 16 by9 pixel beds we're living at Peak screen and so it's through this lens that we're starting to recognize wait a minute all this headset arvr stuff which many of us grew up you know as you know a you know a $20 game at the mall and now you know a game that our kids play you know with their with their headsets you know and that that stuff is starting to move into the main not because it's shiny or Capital intensive but because it's it's a simple gateway to get us out of the tyranny of all these screens now interesting okay okay so here's here's where it starts to get real we've seen at our clients endless prototypes and pitches around replacing the you know the heads in boxes videoon meeting with no we're all going to throw on headsets and collaborate in a you know metaverse environment if you will yep that tends not to take off for two reasons one people don't want to wear a toaster on their face to to work but two the the standard or the lift to go from 4k camera faces to 4K Avatar faces it's just okay however folks working in warehouses oil rigs Factory floors these cats have been sold tablets phones laptops for 20 years and the answer has almost entirely been yeah thanks I'm good because I don't want to fall off this platform into the ocean because I'm doodling around on a phone right or I'm holding a tablet and not looking where I'm walking yeah Bingo Bingo and so that sort of blue collar job right the standard for handsfree digitization the leap is profound because suddenly they're going from laminated sheets of daily printed paper to Holy Smokes I can paint pixels over my lived experience where they're needed most that's a real value problem right now what surprised us Keith was on the other end we we casually calling it the other blue collar job doctors surgeons nurses these are folks who you know different sector of the economy but similarly they haven't wanted to be burdened by having little screens in their life all all the time they want to focus on the patient and so here comes you know as as we go from bulky headset to decent looking ski goggles to in a couple years time goodlook glasses we're going to start to see a postp green future where all of the corners of the economy that have kind of said thanks but no thanks to little rectangles in their pocket are going to get busy with digital so is it a case where then the the platform could be dependent on whether someone uses their hands a lot and needs needs the a hands-free uh environment and that's where you might see some of this stuff um because it's interesting that you bring up doctors I was I'm wondering where we might see some things there obviously it would be surger you know surgery assistance yeah and not actually fake CU because again if my doctor shows up in in what I you know if my if if she shows up in in my during my yearly physical and she's wearing a ski mask gogg I'm I'm like running out of there right because I want to see my doctor's eyes so but if if now if a surgeon is using it then yeah that that's acceptable um right so I'm wondering if if if it's this whole handsfree thing handsfree is at or towards the core of it yeah I mean one of our client case studies we Chronicle in in the deoy tech Trends this year is at Stanford medicine where surgeons you know you've heard this old phrase measure twice cut once right you know you could argue it never matters so much as surgery right and so these folks building digital twins of the patient giving it a couple of you know a couple of goes and silico working on pixels before they dare to you know cauterize or cut an atom so yeah hand handsfree I think is ad towards the core the the other side is anywhere where pixels is greatly you know more affordable than than Adams you know we talked to Hyundai that you know the car car manufacturer and they're using Technologies like this to model out their plants and and we said you know how how come and why this as opposed to CAD and traditional laptops and all that they said there's something experiential and real about walking around in a you know kind of an a augmented or or virtual Factory in figuring out exactly how it ought to be before you pour that concrete yeah once you've poured that concrete you know that's that's a one-way door you're not walking that back at least not cost- effectively yeah yeah is there is there any room for a knowledge worker you know again that whole what you and I do on a regular basis we sit at a computer we type we attend meetings we do Zoom calls is there is there any space for an AR VR metaverse type of experience for us or it is always going to be I don't want to put this goofy thing on my head and and and and try to work in in an environment like that um or or is it going to have to be something even more futuristic where I'm just going to have to have a chip implanted in my brain at some point and that'll be the thing that will get me to the metaverse or or sit in a or sit in a pod somewhere with like with like liquid in it that measures everything right you know one one of the the things we often like to say Keith is is that futurists are are secretly historians and you know you look back at the history of human computer interaction and there are a lot of what I like to call Gateway Technologies right like the eight track cassette tape was kind of a bummer you couldn't fast forward you couldn't rewind you know you're stuck between the middle of two songs you didn't like well I thought you could skip I I remember an a track where I could skip the song I think oh the the program yeah you could you there were like four way points you could jump ah yeah um but but the punchline being those became gateways to more elegant accessible Tech like cassettes than mini dis and now you know every song ever in your pocket right here's where I'm going with I think that as we begin and in our research backs this up as we begin thanks to battery advancements bandwidth and Edge compute right the big three as these devices turn that corner from hot headset right to pair of glasses that's when we're going to start to see a generation for whom it would be more natural to paint pixels at work as needed yeah than to constantly crane down and look at a phone and so it's going to be human factors and it's going to require n you know naturalization into it but I think it's coming for knowledge workers and that the kind of that middle of the bell curve just not quite yet and and again when we were asking you were talking about this whole post screen future um and and and then you use the phrase tyranny of the screen um does it NE like it feels like that's a negative connotation is it a bad thing that we're that we've all got different screens uh in our lives for example like I again I bought a new car last year not a new one a new used one um but it has uh a display and there's apple carplay on it and and I and it's the first time I've had one of those things in my car and I'm going wow I really like this I've now got my my map I've got my music I can plug this in but but on the on the downside sometimes my eyes go towards that screen uh and wouldn't it be great if I could do all this stuff on the dashboard in front of me so I could look at traffic and kind of monitor all this other stuff um yeah just why did you use the word tyranny there I guess is my question you know I I think this might come a little less as a You Know deo's Chief Futures and a little more as as is it father of three yeah yeah just as a as a father of three I see pardon me the the sort of tradeoff between my kids being heads up and engaged with the world and heads down and on their little rectangle and that that binary switch I I see that it's it's two different people right like get you know getting my my little guy my 11-year-old off of his of his games it it really feels like he's coming out of hyper sleep and you know needs a couple minutes to re acclimate and so when I say tyrania screens it's really this this recognition that when you're really zoned into an alternative reality um you're not present in this one and I I think a lot of these augmented reality tools Done Right are going to allow people to re-engage and bring the best of physical and digital back together into something a little more holistic something a little more integrative yeah and that again that might be me as an aspirational dad more than as a technology researcher but you know sign me up for less chiropracty and nerdneck well I mean that is one of the topics that was brought up on on a lot of these reviews that I was reading about the Vision Pro was this um discussion of do I want to be in there or do I want to be out here and is there is there a middle ground between this out there and in there and even even if even if you're in an augmented reality world that's still separate from nonre or reality reality I guess um so it should be interesting to see where this develops obviously I I don't have the answer right now and I don't think you guys do either I mean but you know that is something that would be looking to in the future so and again you've got you've got an 11-year-old I've got I've got three teenagers and it's not going to get any better for you Mike I can tell you right now yeah you're you're the real futurist with three teenagers in the house well let me tell you about that all right let's jump into the uh the next Trend uh and you know it only took a matter of time we're going to have to talk about AI um so uh the the trend that you guys have said is that the genie is out of the bottle um and that geni is going to be a growth Catalyst in 20124 uh I think that the report mentions either this is either the report mentions this or this is my interpretation of it um but you're basically saying it's the year of moving from quote art of the possible to Art of the profitable and is that the best way of saying that this is the year that we're moving beyond these uh pilot programs and into the nitty-gritty what what was your big takeaway from this gen Trend and I and actually I have a quote I have a great quote from the report that I want to talk about but but first I want to hear what your thoughts on the themes themes are surely so you know we all know you can't you couldn't walk you know 15 feet this past year without hearing about gen gen have you heard about it you know my my I'll never forget my aunt uh last November when when you know the the cat GPT first dropped she's literally putting sweet potatoes on my plate and she says did you know robots can paint pictures and write poems now it's unbelievable and I'm sitting there giving my station I was like I am aware but but here's the punchline as Geeks as technologists and researchers you know we'll be the first to tell you that llms Transformer models diffusion models these are Evolutions not revolutions right this is the next page in a book that that computer scientists have been writing for at least since 1956 but but it's a business Revolution we stop why because suddenly the people who you know write think pieces for a living are finding that that automation water line is getting to the point where it too can write think pieces for a littleit so what do you get yeah exasperate right and so as the sort of chattering class finds itself in in the you know the throws of Automation and augmentation it it stands to reason that that the chatter is is all geni all the time now here's what we're seeing at clients 2023 was this this year of mass experimentation uh my my friend and colleague Bill Briggs like to call it random acts of digital right people at the departmental level whipping out credit cards and buying a trial and fooling around with it and a lot like the early blockchain era we started to see a lot of hammers in search of names right hey we got this thing and it can do anything what do you want it to do but the trick being you start to see at clients that they're B for ating into two groups there's one group that says I don't know what I would do because I'm not incented or trained to be terribly curious what should it do yeah right and so you get terms like what should be just called natural human curiosity being like prompt engineering really no just think creatively think different right that that's that's the punchline then you've got more Progressive or pioneering clients we're saying wait a minute this isn't some tool that we just use to skinny up to do today's work with with fewer people this is finally a means to redeploy Precious human Cycles on our strategic backlog and our higher order problems AKA let's do new and improved work with the same gang right and so for us the biggest learning around geni is um you know the short-termist are looking at it as a bit of like a crash diet let's skinny up and please the the street but you can't shrink your way to success right the clever clients are saying wow let's automate the mck so we can redeploy our people to that backlog we've been kicking the can on for the last five years yep there's a great quote in this in this section of the report uh actually there's two great quotes and and maybe you're the one responsible for these quotes so um I'm I'm giving you some props blushing I'm pre I'm preliminarily blushing what what are Mike just take credit for it at this point even if you didn't write it right all right so here's the quote with generative AI as a force multiplier for imagination the future belongs to those who ask better questions and have more exciting ideas to amplify that's one of the questions or that's one of the quotes and then the the other one was people will determine whether these tools scale with magic or mediocrity um and and I think that you know was this is this the right response to someone who uses AI to kind of just well we're just going to use AI to replace Place some of the employees and and I think that's what you were talking about with the whole short-term skinny approach um or you know and then the other the other quote was like depending on the person or the company you know AI is either going to be very magical or it's going to be very mediocre and again I I'm going to take responsibility for this because I you know this is this is my quote my opinion it feels like whatever Microsoft is doing with its co-pilot is is going towards that mediocrity it's clippy 2.0 it just feels like it's corporate uh this is the corporate approach to AI rather than something that's that's imaginative and creative and and allows the people to do different things but that's just my opinion I don't um like is that is that I think there was a story in there where you you had you were doing a focus group or there was a focus group and you asked two different people to use a generative AI image generator and and just to tell that story if you can I know I'd love to keth it's my favorite it really is um so we last November uh November of 22 we had a um a convening we we call it our AI Forum deoe AI Forum we had a convening of um C sea level Executives of some companies you've heard of right you know some some of the faces we we're used to seeing on on our TVs over you know stock tickers and and I was playing the role of um Willie won right I'm I'm demonstrating these then brand new two World tools that can paint any picture you want to see so I say to this one arms crossed Financial executive identity is protected to protect the the guilty here yeah but I'm you know and I'll make myself a bit of a character I'm like sir it'll paint anything you want anything whatever you desire what do you want to see and he looks at it and he goes well show me a sunset and and Keith you get it right but but the the group of of fellow captains of industry they all sort of Gran audibly like that's all you got right but here's where it gets really interesting and I think instructional the picture that comes up is is a sun sunset you know it's kind of a a classically beautiful but ultimately hoam Sunset right we call those Bank calendar images yes and the executive looks at it now he he cross his arms even harder and he says well it's just a Sunset and and again my you know little you know thinky bubble over my head is like yeah you know here's why you know in geek culture we developer culture we have this idea of garbage in garbage out and what we're seeing with generative AI is it's it's garbage in garbage squared right but but here's the happy ending it can be genius in genius squared too because the chief of staff for that same grumpy individual this this younger woman leader she she bursts into the circle and she says can I go and I said I I I would love you to go and she goes okay I want to see potato chips versus pretzels in a fight and the potato chips get numchucks and the pretzels get squirt guns and the whole flipping things on Mars right now Keith we the circle this same collection of um you know Executives the first look on everybody's face is she's [Music] crazy the second moment the second micro expression is that's awesome yeah and then the picture renders to literal Applause all of these leaders start clapping and celebrating the the the Wonka machine as it were and you know like like Pat Marita at the end of uh you know like the Karate Kid I'm I'm Qui L celebrating her because what what I'm coming to learn and I think what our research is showing us in in Leaps and Bounds is that these machines are only as interesting as the humans that are choosing to do interesting things with them yeah and it's not about the hammer it's about the rusty nails that we prioritize in solving yeah just as a side note to that Mike I want to when I've been experimenting with a lot of the the image generation parts of of generative AI I am still fascinated by a prompt that is generic not because I just want to see a sunset or or something like that I want to see what the AI thinks is a Sunset and so sometimes I'll just put in I'll put in like a a a phrase like old man yells at Cloud uh which is basically a reference to that Simpsons meme type of a thing with Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud but then the you start to notice maybe some of the biases in the training set because I didn't specify I didn't all I said was old man yells at cloud and I get four images of it's it's always uh an old white guy with white hair he's probably balding he's wearing like it's almost like it comes up with the Trope or The Stereotype that you would think unless you start getting specific like okay I want an old man uh or I want an old yelling at a cloud but even the old women were were were you know were similar into into this stereotype um maybe that's just me and and so sometimes I I will do two prompts I'll do a you know I'll do the crazy potato chips fighting pretzels but sometimes I want to I want to see I'm just going to give you a generic statement and and and the variety never changes that's that's what what I find interesting at the moment you know Keith I I love your example there around what what we might think of as preconditions or sort of the The Ether the shared ether on which this stuff stands you know one one of the client examples we we heard about in in our D Tech Trends research was we we talked to Eastman Chemical out of good old Kingsport Tennessee and you know they make Window Films they make hundreds of things that just kind of power um you know our lived experience yeah and they had years of sales calls data um because you know for years we as techies have known that disc is cheap and you know this call may be recorded quity purp go off to some disc on a cloud somewhere do they actually ever use it for training purposes or is it just well but here here's the thing Keith I love I love the authenticity of your question because now they can yeah so so they weren't using it before but now they are well right because if if you you know it reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Arc where you know they put the Arc of the Covenant in the warehouse never to be seen with the introduction of generative AI they can make 10 years of sales call transcripts a searchable conversational sales buddy on the side and so now when their sales Pros are having a discussion with a customer and they encounter an objection in real time they can say hey uh they're you know they're they're pushing back an XYZ what might I do and this friendly guide on the side can say well you know last seven years of data say you might want to come back with blah blah blah right right and so the the reason I share that in light of your point around biases and and kind of the ether is if you just Plum the last eight years of sales data you're going to get the eight last eight years of tropes and habits but what what they've started to recognize and I think a lot of our clients have too is that you need to introduce what's called a constitution on top of that that says here's how we've been but here's how we further aspire to be okay and so let's use less you know gender biased language let's use less in the way of like you know historical Rapport building tactics and more in the way of this that and the other thing said another way we need to teach these digital children well and we can't just say hey here's the last decade let's repeat that at scale yeah no let's take that and then J it up with our aspirations of who we wish to be yeah what what'll be interesting would be the number of companies that then take that next step and try to become more aspirational um yeah we'll see we'll see how that happens all right there's there's there's four more Trends I want to get to so I don't want to I again we could talk for hours on this but I want to kind of keep this within our our time limit uh the next one is smarter and not harder uh Beyond Brute Force compute many new technologies will require increasingly sophisticated code and computing power which means more than just the traditional cloud computing architectures so what do you see as as kind of on the horizon here uh in in the world of and I guess we're talking infrastructure networking and and all sorts of It kind of fun it stuff yeah that that's right Keith you know this this one gets a little more back of the house and and a little more you know uh you Unix admin energy you know as opposed to uh you know pop culture but but but this stuff matters yeah and here here's so you know you can't talk with an emerging technology person without the obligatory Moors law reference right you this this multi-generation recognition that you know the the Cs have costs have the performance doubles and you know the the the joy increases every 18 months great well here's the deal as the laws of physics start calling into doubt you know the ability for that that series of you know miracles to continue at at at PACE a lot of our clients have found that virtualization and parallelization have been the next two rabbits out of the hat in a world where miniaturization isn't quite cutting it okay right and so you get you get Cloud you get multicore you get all of the you know the last 10 years of the it Playbook right hybrid architectures private public clouds etc etc etc Bingo y here's what's changing in the same way that out Outsourcing and offshoring 20 years ago was just a straightup cost Arbitrage story right like hey these people over here can do the same work for pennies on the dollar right but gradually markets are going to market right the world gets flat and now the story for outsourcing or offshoring is hey no we're going to move to the Philippines because they're great at this not because they're just cheap at this okay well so too we're starting to see that Dynamic with Cloud where okay wait a minute if I move everything lift and shift from my basement to that company's giant basement I might not necessarily just save money anymore right the the the the money savings angle is in the process of equalizing and so the question and this is really at the core of the trend we're seeing is okay if it's not just about big no-brainer moves anymore what's it about it's about big brainer moves it's about saying okay these three subsets of processes work best on our kit in our server room these two require fresh code and should be run on edge compute on brand new processors right and then these three over here by all means yeah ship it out right cloudsource it but the punchline whether it's coal Roots group in Belgium saying we've got all this operational Tech at the edges that's underleveraged let's use it to share with you know help Drive our compute power right right or Enbridge up in Canada saying listen we're going to treat it Edge and data center as a a basket of different tools for different purposes and really focus on writing the right code running on the right chip um the era of as I like to say big dumb binary lift and shift is is now behind us and it's back to Let's architect the heck out of this and do the right stuff on the right chips because that's where what we're going to have to do to save money okay okay there was another there was another part of this predict or this this trend that I wanted to ask you a question about you you you said that even on the you know again on the horizon would be post digital scenarios so I wanted you to talk about the whole post digital idea um and then scenarios such as Quantum and neuromorphic Computing um which anytime someone says Quantum Computing to me it's just like just over my head like yeah I'm like I start thinking Quantum Leap and I start thinking you know shorting ear's cat basically um so can you explain this to you know this fifth grader type a person I know I'm I'm being a little self-deprecating no well but I'll I'll be self-deprecating right back with you when of my like a Harry Anderson in Night Court used to have that black and white photo of meltor May was his hero I've got a Richard feeman back there because I'm a nerd but Richard feeman Quantum physicist attached to the Manhattan Project you know famously said listen uh e even Quantum physicists can barely understand or explain quantum mechanics and so rest assured I'm right there with you yeah but but but the idea the idea really is this um classical Computing is anchored on mathematics and no matter how elegant or sexy CPU compute GPU compute AI compute gets it's ultimately just math and statistics right Quantum Computing is this fundamentally different animal it says listen um what if we could solve Wicked sticky problems not with mathematics but with physics with the fundamental nature of the way the the world works and and one of the better analogies I've ever heard Keith is soap bubbles right if if you you know you're doing the dishes or you're washing your hands do the bubbles know how to form are they mathematical Geniuses do they do they understand the path no it's surface tension right it's just it's easiest for the bubbles because physics finds easy right and so with that same idea in in to imagine a a a a cryptography problem or a traveling salesman problem or a chemical modeling problem anchored not on mathematics but on what did the bubble say is easiest right like what's the shortest path between 53 cities for a sales Pro ask the bubbles right and so this stuff is fascinating but it's only beginning to turn the corner from science problem to engineering problem okay and so generally speaking it's been a not ready for Prime Time tech for the last 5 10 years yeah the good news is five years ago it felt like it was roughly 10 years away today it feels like it might be you know less than five so we're it it it won't be five years away for forever okay we're it and does this does this require a a kind of breakthrough or something that that doesn't exist right now or is it just a matter of we just need X Y and Z to to align correctly to get to this point like is it still an engineering problem yeah it it as of as of my latest understanding it tends to come to noise and noise management and conditions management that we we can run what our called cubits at a number right and quality that can emulate and approach the effectiveness of today's fastest supercomputers we're I don't want to say orders of magnitude but we're a couple clicks away from getting those things to work at a size and scale where it becomes a no-brainer versus today's machines okay but the the moment that cooks up it's going to be a gold rush and so many of our clients around the world are appropriately putting their energy into identifying Quantum ready use cases because the moment this stuff is available and it won't be us building quantum computers in our basements right this will be cloud-based Services right but like like the old days where you'd share time on the Central Computer right right if you've got your ducks in a row and you know the questions you want to hand to that Quantum machine you're going to be in a much better spot than the folks who are just saying oh that's ready now we should start thinking you know I I would I would be the guy with the really dumb question in line you be like oh wait I thought this was the line for the bathroom I'm sorry well do you have a question sir it's like yeah where's the bathroom right yeah Douglas Adams Vibes like secret 42 get out of here next right right right yeah uh okay so let's move on to to again I still want to get through some of these um so the next one is from devops to devx uh empowering the engineering experience for companies looking to attract retain and engage Tech Talent there's going to be a focus on developer experience which is now the devx idea uh developer first mindset so and you're saying that this is going to result in integrated platform choices intuitive tool chains development pods and cultural shifts to enable tradition and quote citizen developers to drive Tech value I've heard the phrase uh citizen developers before we're starting to see that a lot um can you just explain why this is a big deal like why why is this shift happening um again I'm not in the the developer space as much as other other people within the industry are so can you explain to the audience why this is a big deal in a big major trend for the year yeah for sure you know so Keith what 10 years ago with our deoe Tech Trends research we we put this provocation out out into Market we said Hey listen everybody's going to be a technology company and you know you can imagine mid you know mid Western mid-market insurance companies you know saying like whatever kid right because you know not not us right but 10 years on here we are yeah virtually every company is tech-based if not Tech adjacent and and and with that pardon me with that has really come this recognition that a growing percentage of Enterprise workforces are techies developers Engineers coders Geeks here's why this is important Geeks are wired up differently than the traditional White Collar lad climbing executive okay right most organizational incentive plans and career models right cultural rules and mores it's all about work really hard right you know sacrifice you know deliver big outcomes then what do you get the raise in the promotion you move up the ladder right lots of tech when handed that raise they're grateful but the promotion it sounds like a threat you you want me to put down my my laptop and pick up a briefcase no thing right boom yeah and so what we're seeing is devx or developer experience it's really just a term that says listen um this crowd ticks differently they're wired differently and so rewards incentives compensation culture right rules red tape need to be rethought of to be friendlier to developer culture so when it comes to Promotions we talked to City Bank they said listen um we want to reward our highest performing developers not by forcing them to put on the suit and tie and stop coding we say no you just unlock the opportunity to code more things in a wider array right like growing horizontally right we here at deoe we're drinking our own champagne on this in a big way and saying listen I know Engineers are an increasingly you know not increasingly they are a tier one part of our go forward Workforce and so let's change the way we look at authorizing software packages right authorizing who's who in terms of the ability to do code commits and reviews Etc all this stuff that used to feel like you know not on the mind of the Chief Human Resources officer it it suddenly is because techies are a big bigger part than ever of today's Enterprise Workforce right now but then get into the citizen developer part does that also mean that those of us that were not in the the IT department or in that developer space does that mean that there's there's good stuff for us to happen in the future or or we're going to have to basically code our own stuff or like that that that frightens me a little bit just a little bit I think but I'm also a techie at heart too but I but you know again I'm I'm mainly a journalism guy yeah well you know Keith i i as a bigger share of Workforce has becomes technologists as day job what you start to see is that there's a concentric circle around that of everybody and their brother and sister starting to not just uh there was this term a decade ago BYOD bring your own device yep I remember y yeah consumerization of it Etc well what what we're starting to see is is there's this idea that thanks to tools like geni English is now a fifth generation programming language and so it stands to reason that you know Charlie or Phyllis in accounting can create a program to accelerate their Professional Day using the language they've got which is English and so part of this for the citizen developer is making it easier for folks to make the right decisions and use the right tools than to sort of go color out of the lines and and create problems and and so let me get real breast tax here it's saying okay we know these folks are going to whip out credit cards and buy their own unapproved tools if we say no to everything yeah that that's that whole Shadow it Rogue it concept yeah right so let's start saying yes to the right subset of things yeah so that you know all these folks around the Enterprise they're in incented to and free to experiment with tools that have been approved and vetted and governed as opposed to credit card swipes everywhere and wondering what's going down yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see the companies that allow this rather than just try to force feed uh or not say force feed but you know force them into a box that they don't want to be in um so yeah so Phyllis in accounting decides to start coding or or use some of these tools but then she presents it to the company and the company goes oh you need X Y and Z in order for this to work and and then they pass it on to their regular their traditional uh IT staff or developer staff and then that developer goes well this doesn't look right to me and then they change it again and phyllis's original idea is now awful or or not follow through like do you get what I'm saying like that's that's where I have some doubts about this you know how how how far I I guess Phyllis would then have to quit and basically start her own company well you know it was interesting Keith in one of the conversations we've had about this trend with with some folks is that you know the there's an ele there's we're in a cyclical moment right where where companies are uh in some cases skinny up and rationalizing their technology workforces where it it doesn't feel like you know at this moment in time we need to bend over backwards for technology wants and and and desires but but in the macro right the macro shows us that the lens points to more techies and more Citizen techies and so um you know momentarily it you know it's not this populist movement you know because interest rates in the economy and the rest but but generally speaking you know the hyperscalers and the tech pure plays have shown us where this is headed yeah and so the afor mentioned you know Midwestern Banks they're going to find themselves living this in the next couple years okay once comes soon all right we got two more to get through I know we're going to get through this Mike uh defending reality uh is is another Trend where you talk about truth in an age of synthetic media AI tools are now allowing Bad actors to impersonate and deceive targets uh and you know we see these with deep fakes all over the place whether it's entertainment politics or or Enterprise type types of uh uh attacks new tools are helping to contribute to the defense and you're saying responses are going to be able to identify harmful content and make employees more aware of emergent risks so that's pretty optimistic given how we've already seen you know a bunch of stuff out there so I guess this Falls within that security and Trust bucket that you were talking about earlier um so do you feel like 2024 we will start seeing a lot more uh ability for employees to know whether or not they're being you know truthful or you know if if something that it sounds legit if it's a if it's a someone using an AI tool to to uh use their voice to impersonate the CFO type of a thing you know Keith I mean the short answer shortest answer ever is is yes okay but but you know double clicking in this just a bit the the thing with the security and trust or the Cyber bucket is that it it always reads like a Serial Adventure right in this episode our stalwart protectors have the momentary upper hand you know check back next year when the baddies now have the McGuffin Well here here's what I would tell you two years ago in our deoe Tech Trends we chronicled this idea called cyber AI real defense and it was the recognition that in a world where the the baddies had proliferated in number much faster than than you know reputable universities could churn out good guys that the Defenders the goodies were using AI as a as a means of pattern detection and you know momentary outlier uh augmentation uh in in plain English uh robot reinforcements at the end of that chapter we talked about sooner than later the baddies are going to have these tools too and then right you know right on time here we are in 24 and what we're seeing Keith is that the person who used to write the poorly spelled you know Nigerian prince email yep good enough to fool Grandma right that individual using AI can now create a an astonishingly believable simulation of Keith who can hop in on a zoom call and ask to borrow your password yep and at its heart it's the same old social engineering Vector that gets you every time the problem is that we literally can't believe our eyes and ears anymore and it's not just for the traditionally gullible right so you know the the the big takeaway here is running digital Communications through this sort of digital truth serum tools like reality Defender and others that can get in and kind of Watermark and inoculate us against that noise uh it's going to increasingly be the norm because you know we've seen we've seen apps from folks they they put up 25 faces five are synthetic and they're offering ,000 rewards to anybody who can find the the five fakes nobody has yet and this on the public web wow okay and so in short yeah it's in a post trust post trust our own senses World we're going to have to fight math with math okay and we think that this is the year that it'll happen or is it going to take more than a year to to sort of to develop this this yeah I would say again we always we always see that arms race thing it's like someone goes up here and then oh got to catch up oh go again yeah it's it's like this constant battle that's it the the the Battlefront right now in in cyber departments around the world is oh my goodness shockingly believable synthetic voices and faces and videos yep are are are it's the new coal face it's the new warfront yeah uh it's not going to it's not going to it didn't start this year and it won't end this year but that's where the action has been you know back to the serial you know thinking check back next year as we find you know what's new and never ending in the world of spy versus spy okay all right and then and then the the number six bucket uh the of the trend for 2024 is this this thing that you call The Core workout um and you're we're moving from technical debt to technical Wellness now technical debt is is the idea of you know companies have been spending lots and lots of money on once cutting Edge Innovations and now they've got this core Tech that needs to be modernized so it's this whole concept of modernization um now instead of reactive or peace meal approaches to technical debt you're saying companies are going to likely become more holistic which means technical Wellness is a you know again you you've used this big metaphor around um health and wellness assessments um so you're saying that preventative Wellness assessments will identify areas of their Tech stack that can continue to serve business needs and prioritize those that need treatment and that self-healing Technologies are going to also reduce the uh modernization spend that companies are going through um so continue the metaphor because I think it's a great it's a great one but can you explain what you're seeing companies that are you know instead of just throwing all the money and throwing out the old system something new is going to happen right yeah no h happily Keith you know the pardon me one of the biggest questions we get in our our Techron work is you know what for something focused on what's new why do you always have this section on on on what's old right you know Legacy Tech debt and and corod and application renewal and the fact is it&#
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