“Cloud adoption momentum in the GCC will gain further impetus in 2024”

This year, GenAI and Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, are positioned as vectors of change. Developing generative AI implementation strategies will be imperative for technology leaders, prioritizing key areas such as business model building, internal operational improvements, risk mitigation, and overall organizational efficiency. As we approach the year 2024, Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice President and Regional Managing Director META at IDC discusses with CIO Middle East 2024’s top tech trends and future CIO challenges.

Q. How has the past year changed the landscape for technology leaders?

In 2023, leading organizations in the region shifted gears towards DX 2.0, and made rapid progress towards becoming “digital businesses”. This was underpinned by widespread digital-first adoption across functions and LoBs. Widespread automation,  adoption of innovative digital business models, industry digital ecosystem partnerships, and integration with the digital economy through organic and inorganic initiatives accelerated.  

GenAI created tremendous interest, and is giving a boost to enterprise AI strategies, and promises to enable many business outcomes. A lot of organizations started exploring a variety of GenAI-enabled business use cases, and especially large organizations (with more than 500+ employees) have been more enthusiastic about adopting this new technology, mainly due to the competitive pressure, availability of financial resources, and skills to support. 

Q. What do you forecast to be 2024’s top tech trends or emerging topics in the Middle East and what’s driving these trends?

GenAI: It is still early days, but significant interest in exploring use cases and piloting GenAI, across functions and processes. Use cases in areas such as customer service, financial reporting, content marketing, code development and others are being taken up by early adopters. The cost of developing and running GenAI-enabled business use cases will be among the key inhibitors of this technology in the short run. The training of the GenAI models is quite compute intensive and as a result, many initiatives will be postponed.

Sovereign Clouds: Digital sovereignty is a major consideration, given the uncertain geo-political environment, especially in the regulated sectors like govt, financial services, healthcare, oil & gas and others. This is driving the emergence of various sovereign cloud services and solutions, often through partnerships between global and local cloud providers.