AI Safety, Personalisation Among Top Trends Impacting Technology Providers In 2024: Gartner

Gartner Inc. has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024.  According to experts, generative artificial intelligence is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider.

However, there are new points of friction in growth plans, points of fusion in marketing and sales, and relationships opening up to technology and service providers.

“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 Gen AI to reshape providers, it is not the only influence facing technology leaders,” said Eric Hunter, managing vice president at Gartner.

Below are the trends that will impact technology providers in 2024, according to Gartner:

Efficient Growth For High Tech

Significant growth in IT spending over the last decade benefited high-tech companies. Capturing that growth led them to pursue a “growth at all costs” strategy. However, as macroeconomic conditions create uncertainty among buyers and increasing costs of capital shift investor focus to margin growth, tech providers will focus on efficient growth. Efficient growth strategies recognise the value in growing in ways that strengthen current margins and future revenue opportunities. 

New Enterprise IT-Provider Relationships

Increased business and technical demands require enterprise IT to cover more ground at a deeper level and a faster pace, eroding enterprise IT’s capacity and capabilities. This creates a trend for product leaders at 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. 

Sustainable Business Grows

Sustainability efforts and managing the environmental, social and governance impact have focused on mitigating internal risk and ensuring compliance. Product leaders must evolve by embracing double materiality and holistic leverage of emerging technologies to meet sustainability objectives.

AI Safety 

The rapid development of Gen AI technologies has fuelled the discussion around responsible AI and AI safety, 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 the 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 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

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.

Personalised Marketplace Experiences

Specialised digital marketplaces are emerging to help buyers navigate the complexity of procuring, implementing and integrating solutions. Product leaders who do not offer their services through personalised digital marketplaces limit their findability for their target customers. Gartner predicts that 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels by 2025. 

Industry Cloud Delivers Growth

Service providers, hyperscalers, independent software vendors 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.

PLG And Value Converge For Hybrid GTM

Product-led growth focuses on showing value to product users, creating intent signals that GTM teams can use with prospective buyers. But most companies using a PLG GTM realise that a 100% self-serve GTM motion isn’t tenable, and sellers must be involved to convert deals. Buyer needs for business value and outcome justification will blend PLG tactics with value management and realisation initiatives in hybrid GTM strategies.

Precision Marketing And Sales

Rapidly evolving technology advances, such as Gen AI, digital buying and the metaverse, are changing how tech providers market and sell technology. Tech providers failing to adopt new approaches will see the erosion of overall deal quality combined with the loss of relevance and limited growth within established accounts.