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Positioning Your Enterprise for 2024—and Beyond
2024 may well be the year when the AI hype meets reality.
If you were enjoying a little well-deserved down time last week,
you might have missed some of No Jitter’s year-end coverage, which mostly
focused on looking ahead to 2024. Naturally AI dominated the discussion, as I
expect it will continue to do as we head toward Enterprise
Connect 2024, which is now less than 3 months away
(March 25 – 28 in Orlando).
One noteworthy development during
the usually-slow last week of the year, which sets some context for 2024’s debates
over AI, was the lawsuit filed by the New York Times against Microsoft and
OpenAI, charging the two tech powerhouses with copyright infringement in
training their AI models. The suit serves as a reminder that critical
compliance issues are still to be resolved for many applications of AI.
Indeed,
some of our No Jitter writers chose to focus on the potential for 2024 to be a
year when AI hype clashes with some of the hard realities that may lie ahead.
In his 2024 predictions post,
industry veteran David Danto opined that AI will not take over the
collaboration world this year: “It’ll be more like taking the first few steps
up a very long staircase,” Danto wrote. “For all of 2024 we’ll still be far
closer to that first step than the very distant last one.” Similarly, analyst
Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates predicted a “backlash” driven by
uncertain ROI for AI in collaboration.
CX and the contact center are another matter, though. Robin
Gareiss of Metrigy presented research showing
that, “39% of IT, CX, and business unit leaders say 2024 will be the turning
point for their company’s acceptance of using AI for customer interactions.
Another 20% say that will happen in 2025.” Gareiss adds some caveats around
consumers’ resistance to chatbots and business leaders’ cautious attitude
toward generative AI, but does anticipate AI boosting self-service and voice of
the customer applications.
Finally,
Tom Nolle of Andover Intel takes the long view in
arguing that the industry needs to recognize what he regards as just about a
once-in-a-lifetime situation: “We’re in the most revolutionary period in
technology for decades, maybe for all time, with the reality of the Internet
combining with the promise of AI,” he writes. “You don’t justify a revolution
with trivia, you have to think big, think not only out of the box but ahead of
it. That’s what enterprise technology planners, planners like you, need to be
doing in the new year.”
All
of these themes will find an outlet at Enterprise Connect 2024. The event’s
mission has always been to help you position your enterprise for what’s
next—whether that’s an imminent technology migration or need for strategic
positioning on a potentially revolutionary technology like AI. Our conference
tracks on AI, CX,
and Collaboration & UC all
feature perspectives on AI that will give you the range of opinions, research,
and experience.
And
as the hybrid work picture appears to settle in, another topic Danto addresses
in his No Jitter post, our Video Collaboration/AV and Employee Experience tracks
are packed with enterprise-led sessions as well as sessions offering you a
strategic vision for how best to equip your meeting spaces for
collaboration—whether those spaces are in the office or at a user’s remote
location.
So
I hope you can join us in Orlando to get the learning and networking that can
help you plan how to make new technologies drive better collaboration and
customer experience for your enterprise. You can get more information and see
our amazing list of enterprise speakers at the event’s
home page. See you at Enterprise Connect!