The Digital Business Impact of AI Everywhere

Get an update on the state of the IT market and the outlook for technology budgets in 2024/2025, with a focus on vertical industry trends and forecasts, including forecasts for AI spending by industry. The economic outlook remains uncertain, despite resilient performance in the past 12 months, and businesses around the world are working with multiple scenarios for IT budgets in 2024. In particular, the emergence of new generative AI solutions has created compelling investment priorities for organizations in a number of key industries, along with continued growth in digital transformation and emerging technologies.

AI, particularly GenAI, is both a disruptor and a value driver for the services industry. The pervasiveness of embedded AI in service delivery will reshape all services markets – from business services, to IT services, to digital engineering and operational technology (OT) services – though the impacts will vary. While transforming internally, services providers need to continue delivering value and meeting evolving customer needs, including supporting customers through their own AI transformations. In this session, discover IDC’s latest research on buyer expectations for how AI will impact their relationships with services providers in the next few years, and hear recommendations on how to turn your AI transformation into competitive advantage.

We will also describe the adoption of a triple hybrid architecture by accident, including the implications and importance of creating a set of metrics to measure the performance you require from IT. Once this is agreed, AI tools can help with both assessments and simulations. 

Additionally, the prerequisites for scaling an AI program are often not addressed early or effectively. A certain level of data literacy, maturity, and governance allows full participation and confidence in AI use cases.

In 2024, India's economy is poised for a robust 6.3% GDP growth, fueled by rapid digitalization and robust governmental support. Despite challenging global macroeconomic conditions and inflationary pressures, there exists a significant opportunity for IT vendors to forge strong partnerships by delivering scalable, tailored solutions, offering strategic consulting, and showcasing targeted use cases that precisely align with client needs and value propositions. This session will shed light on key trends, hurdles, the emergence of cutting-edge technologies, and innovative business practices, as well as the expectations of Indian enterprises and opportunities for IT vendors.

AI's increasing integration into society is driving significant economic impact, prompting organizations across sectors to explore its potential. AI's tangible business value is evident in IDC's findings that organizations globally typically gain a $3.5 return for every $1 invested in AI. As Indian enterprises increasingly leverage AI to drive growth and innovation to enhance productivity, personalize customer experiences, and accelerate R&D, they will require clear demonstrations of AI's business value to invest effectively, including understanding industry-specific use cases, expected ROI, and implementation strategies. The government also plays a crucial role in promoting ethical AI adoption while stimulating innovation, marking a shift towards efficiency and competitiveness in Indian businesses. This widespread AI adoption signifies a transformative shift in the Indian business landscape, paving the way for future advancements.

This panel discussion will have IDC's industry analysts for healthcare, finance, telecommunications, government, retail, and manufacturing articulate their perspectives on innovative AI uses cases and the role of government in driving ethical use of AI by Indian enterprises, as well as provide IT vendors with recommendations on how to create competitive advantage from the current "AI Everywhere" trend.

The concept of an experience-orchestrated (X-O) business, which aims to deliver shared experience value powered by intelligence, emphasizes the need for organizations to evolve from siloed digital transformations to holistic experience management, leveraging technologies like GenAI to scale intelligence via automation. It enables enterprises to increasingly focus on accelerating digital innovation to improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive value, emphasizing IT agility and automation empowerment. By integrating GenAI, automation, and low-code/no-code capabilities, businesses can improve experience orchestration by enhancing contextualization, efficiency, and scalability across various contact points along the value chain. It also enables enterprises to embrace agile, cloud-native models, DevOps, and Low-Code No-Code application delivery strategies to accelerate innovation efforts, outperforming traditional methods for scaling and shortening development cycles. 

This session will delve into the realm of experience-driven innovation, exploring how technology-powered application development methodologies will enable companies to orchestrate exceptional experiences for their customers and stakeholders, transforming them into an X-O business, and provide recommendations to vendors on how to respond to experience-orchestrated (X-O) businesses.

As we embark on our journey into the digital future, envision a world intricately woven with interconnected systems, open data flows, and the omnipresence of AI,  integrating AI and ML into industry ecosystems will become a top priority for tech buyers in upcoming years. IDC data reveals a strong commitment from 42% of enterprises, highlighting that this integration is deemed essential for their future strategies in 2024 and beyond. However, while the current benefits lean towards efficiency, innovation, and unprecedented problem-solving capabilities, we cannot ignore a formidable challenge: the amplification of security risks. The evolving threat landscape demands our attention, with sophisticated cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure, personal data, and even AI systems themselves. Open systems and interconnectedness create new and multi-faceted attack vectors, while the potential for malicious actors to exploit AI vulnerabilities, such as bias and manipulation, looms large. In such a threat-ridden landscape, it is imperative that we build security from the ground up and embrace Security by Design. 

In this session, we will take a deep dive into the complex intersection of security with openness and the pervasive integration of AI. We will explore how enterprises plan to navigate these challenges effectively, prioritize and reap benefits from AI use cases, and the role of IT partners to secure their clients' businesses in this complex, open and "AI Everywhere" world. 

As today's enterprises prioritize faster time to market, customer experience, and sustainability, the adoption of AI/ML, blockchain, cloud native architectures and as-a-service models will increase. Applications and data modernization to deliver new services will be the need of the hour. In addition, there will be increased adoption of a platform driven approach, leading to significant growth of PaaS market in India, in addition to SaaS and next-gen digital infrastructure. As a result, hybrid cloud adoption, cloud security, sovereign cloud and sustainability will be in focus. While enterprises go on this drive, they will rely on trusted IT partners for advisory and implementation for new age workloads to achieve business outcomes. This session will focus on the above-said trends in the India market and provide recommendations to vendors on how to bridge the gap between digital infrastructure technology investments and business outcomes