TLDR:
- Gartner has identified the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024.
- These trends include generative artificial intelligence (AI), efficient growth strategies, new enterprise IT-provider relationships, sustainable business practices, and personalized marketplace experiences.
Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024. One of the key trends identified is the dominance of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on the technical and product agendas of tech providers. GenAI reshapes these providers from their growth and product strategies down to the everyday tools used by their associates. However, GenAI is not the only influence facing technology leaders. There are new points of friction in growth plans, new points of fusion in marketing and sales, and new relationships opening up to technology and service providers (TSPs). The immediate and long-term implications of these issues require product leaders to balance between short-term opportunity and long-term advantage and strategies based on economic recovery or recession. Gartner’s top trends for 2024 reflect these dualities.
The first trend identified by Gartner is efficient growth for high tech. Over the last decade, high-tech companies have experienced significant growth in IT spending, leading them to pursue growth without a full measure of the costs. However, as macroeconomic conditions create uncertainty among buyers and increase the costs of capital, Gartner analysts see a trend toward tech providers focusing on efficient growth. This strategy recognizes the value in growing in ways that strengthen current margins and future revenue opportunities.
The second trend is new enterprise IT-provider relationships. Increased business and technical demands are requiring enterprise IT to cover more ground at a deeper level and at a faster pace. This trend creates an opportunity for tech providers to create new relationships and revenue opportunities across the enterprise, including expanded provider roles within enterprise IT and the business, outcome-centric provider-enterprise relationships, and enterprise-wide tier-1 relationships.
The third trend highlighted by Gartner is sustainable business. While sustainability efforts have typically focused on mitigating internal risks and ensuring compliance, product leaders must evolve by embracing double materiality and leveraging emerging technologies to meet sustainability objectives.
The fourth trend is AI safety. Responsible AI and AI safety are not new concepts, but the rapid development of GenAI technologies has fueled discussions around risk management and how to address growing issues such as content provenance and hallucination. Product leaders must build solutions that incorporate safety principles and focus on model transparency, traceability, interpretability, and explainability aspects.
The fifth trend is rising buyer pessimism. Over the past three years, tech providers have observed negative sales pipeline effects due to new buyer behaviors that are colliding with outdated go-to-market models. Gartner emphasizes the need for tech providers to adapt sales and marketing approaches to detect and respond to buyer pessimism to avoid the decline of their GTM operations.
The remaining trends identified by Gartner include vertical generative AI models, personalized marketplace experiences, industry cloud delivering growth, PLG (product-led-growth) and value convergence for hybrid GTM (go-to-market), and precision marketing and sales. These trends reflect the changing landscape of the technology industry and the need for tech providers to adapt and stay competitive.
