Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
With extensive experience in advising businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, James Harvey has developed a clear view of the direction IT is evolving, and what we need to do to prepare for it. Now CTO for EMEA at Rimini Street, James is focused on balancing innovation with long-term strategy.
According to James, AI sits right at the sweet spot between the two. As he puts it, AI will have “the most significant impact on IT over the next decade,” with the potential to reshape the industry “like nothing we have seen before”.
As technological access becomes democratised through AI, IT professionals will need to evolve too. James sees the need to be “business literate” increasing, pointing out that “85% of CFOs think CIOs must be more business savvy”.
Sometimes that means ignoring the hype-filled headlines. James doesn’t think quantum computing will break into the mainstream soon and that businesses need to focus on the foundations.
Which brings us back to artificial intelligence. “AI is undoubtedly exciting,” he says, “but few wish to hear about the investment in infrastructure that is required. Without it, however, there can be no AI”.
All of which means you may be able to guess James’ answer to our first question…
Artificial intelligence – generative, agentic and cognitive – will have the most significant impact on IT over the next decade. The implications for skill sets, how it accelerates the ongoing democratisation of access to tech, the demands it puts on infrastructure, and the regulation requirements are like nothing we have seen before.
No matter what innovations appear in the future, several areas will always require domain expertise, such as cyber, cloud and AI. More broadly, with AI accelerating the democratisation of access to tech, IT’s need to be business literate will only increase. Business users know more about technology than they ever have done, and so they are going to demand more from their IT teams. Our research highlights this point: 85% of CFOs think CIOs must be more business savvy to improve communication.
What happens if IT does not improve these skills? The business could get frustrated with IT and try to implement its own technology, which rarely works well. We have seen what has happened with shadow IT in the past. With AI, the results could be even worse. If every business unit does not get what it wants from IT and decides to deploy its own solutions, there will likely be significant impact to the enterprise tech stack, system security and IT budget.
It is less likely that technologies such as quantum computing and blockchain, while extremely powerful and transformative, will break into the mainstream as soon as we think. By the end of the decade, they may be approaching that point, but the real impact will be from AI. What we consider innovative today will be commonplace in a few years, with companies able to deploy tools, services and even business models much faster than before using AI.
We are currently in the experimental era of AI, where companies pilot programs and run proof of concepts. If that goes well, then we will start to see large-scale rollouts.
However, for AI (or any emerging technology) to have the desired impact, the right foundations need to be in place: if companies can access the right skills, invest and deploy in the right infrastructure (such as choosing the appropriate mix of cloud, edge and on-premises environments), and address issues such as data accuracy.
The use of cloud is growing. According to the Synergy Research Group, in Q2 2024, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure rose by $14.1 billion to $79.1 billion, an increase of 22% compared with Q2 2023.
If that additional cloud use is not managed properly, it can trigger increased storage, computing and data transfer costs.
This is what is driving more enterprises to realise they need to be cloud right, not cloud first. Cloud is a critical part of IT and business infrastructure, but it is not the only way to manage workloads, data and applications. As technologies such as AI put more demand on infrastructure, enterprises need to know the best environment for their apps and data. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, as what is best will vary from use case to use case.
In certain sectors, for instance, we are going to see extended reality (XR) applications that require bandwidth and latency at the edge, and that will put unique demands on IT infrastructure – not just cloud, but edge computing and on-premises.
In cases like those, leaders will opt for a pragmatic strategy, one that is more aligned with a hybrid approach to infrastructure environments than using cloud for all their operations. That does not necessarily mean transitioning out of cloud completely; a pragmatic strategy would include reviewing their entire stack, identifying opportunities to optimise their investments to release capital and then using that freed-up budget in other areas.
There is a temptation to follow the hype in IT, but we should not forget the basics. Most CIOs want to spend their time on innovation because that is what businesses expect, but they end up having to focus on the systems and processes that keep the lights on. AI is undoubtedly exciting, but few wish to hear about the investment in infrastructure that is required. Without it, however, there can be no AI, or certainly not at a level that will scale for enterprises.
For IT, this means being able to make the business case not just for innovation that everyone sees, but for all the work that few are aware of. It is like an iceberg – most people in business are only aware of the front end, but so much more happens below the surface to support that front end.
