CTO Insights for 2024

Business challenges for 2024: what’s on the CTO radar?

With 2024 set to be dominated by elections, we continue to see geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty. From a tech perspective, there have been surprise headcount reductions already from Google and Amazon. The moves show the tech sector hasn’t regained the confidence to aim for high-growth it saw for much of the last decade.

Many organisations are focused on profitability rather than revenue growth, looking to streamline costs and improve efficiency to increase earnings. Combined with the disruption from the generative AI explosion, CTOs have a challenging agenda, prioritising a list of tough, ongoing issues they must navigate this year.

In 2023, unexpected, unpredictable, and fast-moving business issues significantly impacted IT strategies such that CTOs often found themselves in response mode on the back foot, continuously reacting to financial challenges and disruptions whilst seeking to find a stable business-as-usual mode.

To get some semblance of control back for 2024, IT leaders will need to take the lessons learned from 2023’s pain points into actionable, adaptable plans to help their organisation deliver profit and growth targets. Here’s what CoPerceptuo sees as the top five issues on the CTO radar.

1. Balancing cost and agility

The pace and direction of changing business priorities has caused tech leaders to seek rebalance between innovation, optimising costs and preparing to adapt quickly to change - priorities that are frequently at odds. 

CTOs must ensure that new projects are the right ones, improving business performance and driving efficiency. Tech leaders must have different and multiple scenarios ready, plans in hand. It makes for more work in planning and budget cycles.

Agility means automation is a necessity, to secure operational efficiency and boosting productivity. The challenge lies in integrating automation smoothly into existing systems without disrupting the workflow. 

2. Mixing human and machine intelligence

Where competitive advantage can be delivered by AI means making decisions about what aspects of the customer experience should be addressed by human intelligence and which ones will best be served by digital solutions.   

The biggest change landing in the CTO inbox was the emergence of large language models and generative AI. The rate of advancement in these models will continuously be top of the agenda for 2024. 

The availability of these new solutions and their various use cases present both an opportunity and challenge for employee upskilling and reskilling, perhaps the most in a generation. The challenge is in preparing the organisation to take advantage of these opportunities. 

3. Complexities infrastructure management

Managing IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex. This highlights the need for solutions and management tools to simplify and reduce costs, whilst providing significant end-user productivity gains and ensuring more efficient use of resources. 

Legacy system constraints pose ongoing challenges in terms of ‘keeping the lights on’ and a hidden overhead. These necessitate bold, strategic approaches to digital transformation that are cost-effective and sustainable in the long run, whilst also delivering a near-term ROI.

Businesses need to explore scalable, cloud-based solutions that require minimal upfront investment. These solutions should be able to integrate seamlessly with existing systems, overcoming the challenges posed by legacy infrastructure.

4. Cybersecurity

Security concerns have added more workload and pressure on budgets, based on the need for cybersecurity improvements. Adopting a proactive approach to this threat is now a necessity. Aside from the  financial burden, the loss of customer trust that results from a data theft or breach can destroy a company. 

We will see more AI usage in the enterprise environment, but how do you keep the data secure, and how do you deal with the privacy concerns?  It’s where AI is both a hindrance and a blessing. As algorithms get better at detecting and reacting to anomalous network traffic that signals a potential attack, they also become more useful and sophisticated as weapons in the hands of the bad guys. 

The necessity for robust cybersecurity measures is not only about protecting sensitive data, but also about ensuring business continuity. As cyber threats evolve in sophistication, the imperative for stronger security protocols becomes more pressing.

5. Sustainability

Sustainability is increasingly recognised as a driver of growth. At present, of the millions of tons of tech discarded every year, just 17.4% is reused or recycled. Improving this will both reduce the environmental impact of toxic substances and lower the cost to businesses of renewing their hardware.

Customers are increasingly making buying decisions based on a business’s sustainability credentials. Identifying ways that this approach can be tailored to the specific circumstances of individual businesses will be a key challenge IT leaders will have to face in 2024. 

Summary: Navigating uncertainty

The ongoing economic uncertainty combined with the general election, paired with instability in the tech market, has the potential to create uncertainty for CTOs in 2024. These external factors can have a dramatic impact on tech operations and strategic planning. 

Amid the restraints, however, there are opportunities.  CTOs need to give budget and proposed projects more scrutiny to invest in areas that have clear attribution toward generating increased revenue, more efficiencies, and lower costs. This increased scrutiny is actually a good thing, because having a level of constraint forces better decisions.

To guide an organisation through uncertainty, IT leaders must establish a clear set of agreed tech initiatives and outcomes for the organisation.  The main fear is of confronting sunk cost and legacy investment. CTOs know they have to make big things happen, and quickly. More than ever, they have to be agile. Smart technology decisions hold the biggest promise to improve operations. Waiting is a losing strategy.