What Just Happened?
2023 Reflections and Strategic Advice From the C-Suite
Contributors:
David McCurdyChief Enterprise Architect and CTO
Mike GaumondSenior Vice President, Strategy
Amol AjgaonkarCTO, Product InnovationJason RaderVP and Chief Information Security OfficerMegan AmdahlSVP, Client Experience and North America Chief Operating Officer
It may be hyperbole to say 2023 was the year we realized the future is here.
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI to bring the power of generative AI to the masses.
At the same time, Google was feeling the heat from other generative AI conversations that threatened to unseat its place as the beloved search engine — and immediately put the pedal to the metal to develop AI products within the year.
January was also a big month for crypto, bitcoin and — it pains us to remember — tech layoffs. Twitter was still Twitter, return-to-office policies were still loose and the cost of eggs became a barometer of inflation.
That was January.
On February 6, just ahead of Valentine’s Day, Google introduced Bard, their generative AI chat solution they hoped the world would swoon over. It wasn’t love at first launch, but Google pointed to the initial flaws as evidence to the value of rigorous testing, as well as the inevitable risks of racing with new tech.
Just one day later, Microsoft responded with big news of their own: A brand new Bing, now with OpenAI ChatGPT integration.
For the better part of the year, debates about generative AI rose to fever pitch.
Gen AI jostled between hero and villain. In one breath, revered as the answer to save us from menial tasks and empower us to unleash ingenuity. And in the next breath, shut down with warnings of the irreplicable danger and consequences of hastily unleashing a beast. Business leaders and IT decision-makers were left stutter-stepping in the wake of uncertainty and heated debate between tech’s biggest voices.
Of course, not everyone hesitated. Plenty of industry leaders (including Insight) made ambitious (and hopefully cautious) moves to gain a competitive advantage with generative AI (we know we did).
It’s worth remembering, too, that generative AI went mainstream in late 2022. In early 2023, 81% of companies were developing or had developed generative AI policies and had big plans to improve employee productivity, enhance their customer experience, or accelerate research and development.
According to Gartner Hype Cycle tracking, we hit the peak of inflated expectations in 2023. And board members are still wondering (read: demanding), “What is our generative AI strategy?”
At the close of 2023, generative AI is virtually everywhere. Having spread like a native wildflower, gen AI is rooted into everything from search engines and workplace applications to creative software and travel sites.
But to say 2023 was the year of AI is missing the point. Because every year from now on will include AI innovations and surprises. From now on, we must be more open-minded about what’s possible. And question what’s real.
You might even wonder whether this was written by a real person or by generative AI (rest assured, this was 100% written and edited by humans).
Also thought up and written by humans: the following reflections and advice from Insight leaders. We hope these insights give you some confidence (or mere reassurance) about your technology journey for 2024. After all, the future is now. And now is the time to be ambitious.
“I think most IT budgets did not anticipate gen AI in 2023. The distraction was mainly confined to conferences, conversations and research. This will change in 2024 as tech leaders will have an array of new choices, which may affect trends in cloud and cyber, and will most definitely affect traditional applications.”
“As a CISO, I must remind business leaders that gen AI isn’t just being used to supercharge business objectives — the bad guys are using it, too. The threats have never been more prevalent and the risks to a company’s productivity and brand more severe — all due to the use of AI by threat actors to try to infiltrate environments and exfiltrate data. It’s a balancing act with where to focus attention and resources when the reward of gen AI is so great. But don’t take your eye off security.”
“I’m a huge advocate for generative AI and suggested actions for a company to take to effectively pursue it. However, the hype of AI makes it easy to forget why you invest in technology in the first place.
Companies should be sure to think through how technology, AI or otherwise, can help:
Drive growth by providing a superior experience to the company’s customers.
Fuel competitive differentiation by enabling the launch of new products/services.
Enable employee productivity and retention through innovative applications.
Drive profitability through operational efficiency.
If technology is not somehow helping to deliver profitable growth for an organization… why invest in it in the first place?”
“Companies that adopt generative AI and understand its value and place in the ecosystem will realize that it is more of a foundational technology. Some of their challenging use cases could be solved with the combination of generative AI and other traditional technologies. Leaders who understand the technology will leverage generative AI to gain an edge over their competitors and provide a better product or service to their customers, hence gaining market share.”
“Gen AI will enable businesses to completely reinvent their operations. Leaders will initially concentrate on enhancing productivity internally, but this will ultimately transform their methods of operation. Early adopters will gain market share through improved customer service, increased visibility, and ultimately more efficient cost models for delivering their products and services. Truly innovative companies will create new business models and grow in ways that are unimaginable today.”
“As an executive, I hear the same things that other executives are hearing from the business podcasts and financial sites that are talking up the percentage increases in productivity that gen AI will bring.
As a technologist, I see why it will be hard to meet those expectations in some cases. There’s more to using gen AI in an organization than just acquiring it. Some coding and QA roles have some easily realized benefits. For the majority of roles, you can’t really automate processes without having them defined, especially if they’re manual. This means a non-trivial amount of work outside of the dev team that’ll have to be done in order to realize any benefits.
Regardless, I think business leaders will prioritize these efforts and goals will be set based on the inclusion of gen AI.”
“Something interesting about the new focus and availability of AI is its ability to change the way you look at your technical debt. Previously, companies looked at only the benefits of moving to the cloud to calculate ROI. Leveraging gen AI can make refactoring or replatforming your current workloads have a higher ROI than before… one that may even be positive once all the new capabilities are considered.”
“The cybersecurity war is far from over, and business leaders must start preparing for a new wave of AI-enabled cyberattacks. Business leaders must swiftly move away from legacy technology and technical debt. They need to shift this time and investment into more modern, secure and outcome-based technology solutions.”
“Analysis paralysis. The world is moving too fast for indecisiveness. Businesses now require technology leaders to provide value faster than ever. If IT cannot deliver value and outcomes efficiently, decisions and money will go elsewhere.”
“I see three things leaders need to start doing:
1. Embrace newer technology with more speed than before. With the rate at which new technologies are surfacing, not adopting fast enough could have a negative impact on the business as most of the time these new technologies are additive (built over the previous disrupters).
2. Quickly assess risk and security concerns and evaluate how the technology will affect you — and more so how it will impact you if your competitors adopt it and you don’t.
3. Training and reskilling must be redesigned leveraging copilots, such as GitHub copilot and GitHub copilot chat. This must be one of the focus areas for business leaders in 2024.”
“I hope leaders will not consider themselves out of the gen AI game if they’re not in the tech industry. There’s lots of opportunity for all industries to engage the power of gen AI and make their organization more productive and profitable.”
Employees have now endured three years of persistent twists and turns.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted workforces and pushed many organizations to pursue new revenue streams.
Consequently, 2021 became a year focused on accelerated growth that continued into 2022, only to be followed by a year of cost-cutting and reduction.
“If we want to impact change fatigue, we should recognize individual contributors are primarily worried about generative AI and not excited about it.
If you look across the majority of companies, the executive team is enthusiastic about generative AI and would say they are adopting it. But as you move down ranks, the individual contributors would say their company is not using it and they don’t see value.
We can fix that as leaders. We start by upskilling our teams to utilize it, we provide transparency in how we plan or are utilizing it, and we celebrate and reward the early adopters.”
“In the 25 years of my technology career, change has been the only constant. I live by these rules: embrace the change, make strategic choices regarding both technology and partners (you will spend less time fixing these), and surround yourself with people who can and want to deliver.”
“Cost-cutting efforts will leave organizations lean going into 2024. As growth spins back up in 2024, making those teams more productive will be critical. Using gen AI capabilities — such as Microsoft 365 Copilot — will empower teams to do more with less and scale up when the time inevitably comes.”
“Clearly, generative AI was the most significant disruption of 2023. This AI technology has been around for several years, but I was personally shocked by the advancements made in ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo and 4.0.
Another major factor contributing to the disruption was the broad availability of this technology through APIs, allowing developers and enterprises to access it easily. This aspect has not been discussed enough. AI has traditionally been confined, just out of reach for many organizations.
In 2023, organizations reevaluated everything. The persistent concerns surrounding the global finance market compelled businesses to take a closer look at themselves. They questioned whether they were investing in the right technologies, partnering with the right companies, bringing teammates back into the office or not, gaining or losing market share, and ultimately assessing whether they are delivering value to their customers.”
“My biggest takeaway from 2023 is that we’ve been bestowed a phenomenal tool in generative AI, but it alone won’t solve business problems.
ChatGPT is an application, and it’s pretty handy for certain things, but it’s not solving complex business problems on its own.
Leveraging the appropriate Large Language Model (LLM) or Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) as part of an Intelligent Application is where the true innovation will happen in the next 18 months — and where the early adopters will pull away from the pack.”
“Tools based on generative AI will change the way we work. Every so often, there is technology that disrupts — but that disruption is often limited in its influence. Gen AI has influenced not just businesses and its processes but is now known to society in general.
This has a bigger impact on the business, and it will encourage citizen development and potentially disrupt the businesses which are late to adoption.”
“It’s hard not to say generative AI. While the underlying AI algorithms have been around for decades, it wasn’t until quite recently that we had the compute and storage capacity to run the algorithms and the explosion of data from which AI learns.
Still, progress was quite slow until the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) — driven through a simple interface (chat or natural language) and coupled with GPU-enabled compute — unleashed a generational shift. ChatGPT and the like are ushering in the next great wave of change.
That said, I believe generative AI is still in the “irrational exuberance” phase. ISVs and chip makers are making massive investments, and every company is talking about it. But many are not sure what to do next.
Companies should take a few steps: First, establish an AI policy to guide appropriate use and security. Next, stand up a secure environment to enable employee experimentation. Then, modernize your data estate — most are not ready to feed AI! Finally, define the relevant use cases and ROI for your business.”
Ambitious goals become doable when you have the right team. See how partnering with Insight can help you see and surpass what’s possible.
Learn more
