“Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider,” said Eric Hunter, Managing Vice President at Gartner. “The technology reshapes a tech provider from its growth and product strategy down to the everyday tools used by its associates. Despite the potential for GenAI to reshape providers, it 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 (see Figure 1 above).  Here we present just some of the identified trends, but with an emphasis on those that could be of particular interest to the security industry:

Efficient growth for high tech

Significant growth in IT spending over the last decade benefited high-tech companies. Capturing that growth led high-tech firms to pursue growth without a full measure of the costs. This is a “growth at all costs” strategy. High-tech firms anchored their product, organisation and employment plans on a hypothesis of continued strong growth.

As macroeconomic conditions create uncertainty among buyers and increasing costs of capital shift investor focus to margin growth, Gartner analysts see a trend toward tech providers focusing on efficient growth. Efficient growth strategies recognise the value in growing in ways that strengthen current margins and future revenue opportunities.

AI safety

Responsible AI and AI safety are not new concepts, but the unprecedented rapid development of Gen AI technologies has fuelled the discussion around risk management and how to address growing issues such as content provenance and hallucination. Product leaders must build solutions that incorporate safety principles with a focus on model transparency, traceability, interpretability and explainability aspects. Preempting regulatory and compliance issues will be critical to staying competitive in this vibrant Gen AI market by creating trust.

Rising buyer pessimism

Over the past three years, tech providers have increasingly observed negative sales pipeline effects due to new buyer behaviours that are colliding with outdated go-to-market (GTM) models. Without adapting sales and marketing approaches to detect and respond to buyer pessimism, technology providers will see their own GTM operations decline in both internal and external perspectives.

Vertical Generative AI models

While general-purpose models perform well across a broad set of Gen AI applications, they can be impractical for many enterprise use cases that require domain-specific data. Tech providers must explore industry-focused models that can be adapted to specific user requirements using available resources more efficiently. Those failing to do so will face increased costs and complexity in the creation and leverage of models.

Industry cloud delivers growth

Service providers, hyperscalers, ISVs and SaaS providers are turning to vertical solutions to deliver the customer outcomes that will drive provider growth. By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of tech providers will use industry cloud platforms to deliver business outcomes, up from less than 5% in 2023.