Akhilesh, CEO of Digitate, manages Digitate’s product, market, channel and partner strategy for Digitate’s flagship product, ignio™.
Macroeconomic trends and market indicators suggest that the global economy will likely continue to grow slowly in the near future. As a result, enterprises are making significant budget changes for 2023 and beyond. Companies in virtually every industry are bracing for changes, putting CEOs and other executives in a position to make difficult decisions about their financial future—where to increase spending, where to maintain it and where it must be cut.
To ensure fiscal health while protecting future growth, CEOs should consider these three key recommendations.
Make AI Technologies Mainstream In Business
Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to make a growing impact in the market and our society at large, dramatically changing the way organizations do business. No matter the economic outlook today, enterprises must double down on AI to ensure that they’ll be able to innovate and compete against the rest of the market down the road. Companies that refuse to do so—motivated by a desire to cap or cut costs in the present—may find themselves left behind in five to 10 years.
AI and ML offer organizations massive business value. These technologies can support many different use cases, but one of their primary enterprise benefits is supplementing an organization’s current workforce with a vast amount of intelligence. This emboldens a company’s most critical asset—its human capital. AI augments humans with abilities such as reasoning and problem-solving at scale, allowing them to focus their efforts on uncovering new business opportunities, unlocking operational efficiencies, channeling their creativity on high-value projects, and ultimately growing revenue.
AI also plays a big role in improving resiliency. In a digital economy, it is more important than ever for enterprises to have critical IT and business operations that can withstand considerable stress, reducing revenue losses from downtime.
An organization should view itself as an applied AI business—not one using generic AI, not taking a band-aid AI approach. Making AI the core of an organization will help re-imagine business and create an IT model that’s asset-light and intelligence-heavy, moving away from monolithic systems of engagements that push work downstream and make organization slave to tickets.
Make Cloud The Backbone Of Your Enterprise
To accommodate rapid digital transformation and achieve better agility, enterprises should also keep ramping up their cloud investments. Like AI, cloud technology will only become more powerful and more widely deployed in the future. Enterprises that shy away from the cloud today will find themselves at an operational disadvantage versus competitors tomorrow.
Leveraging the cloud makes it easier for a company to scale up and change its IT infrastructure as business demands dictate. As a recent report by McKinsey notes, the cloud “can create a more flexible infrastructure, speed up technology deployment, and get digital products to market more quickly.” Speed and flexibility are critical in an era when market trends can rise, fall and shift quickly. Also, with hybrid and remote work here to stay, using the cloud ensures that enterprises can effectively connect and support their employees no matter where they’re located.
Managing cloud environments, especially multicloud environments, can be a challenging endeavor, but cloud operations can help. There’s a lot of complexity involved in growing, configuring, maintaining, monitoring and securing clouds distributed across many geographies and providers. Organizations can use cloud operations to optimize both cloud resources and cost, eliminating most of the complexity associated with these sprawling environments.
Make IT The Driver For Business
It’s essential that enterprises continue investing in IT. When IT works, business works. IT is no longer considered merely a cost center, it’s the foundation of digital enterprises as it drives business outcomes by increasing productivity and optimizing revenue. By applying technologies such as AI, machine learning, automation and cloud across the tech stack, IT investments will continue to fuel business growth and innovation—both this year and over the next decade.
More broadly, CEOs have to understand that IT is essential to their company’s performance and growth in several fundamental ways and ensure those efforts are a priority. These include:
Business resiliency: IT is critical to improving business resiliency. Employees rely on technology to perform their job on a daily basis – everything from laptops to Wi-Fi networks to SaaS products to servers to cloud deployments. When one of these fails, it can grind a business to a halt. To avoid costly business disruptions, IT must ensure these technologies are working smoothly and are properly maintained, and that there is a backup plan in place in case something goes down.
Customer experience: In today’s digital economy, much of a customer’s interaction with products and services is done through the web. Even if a product or service is not digital, customers still research products online, purchase them online, schedule appointments online, contact customer service online, etc. So much of a customer’s experience takes place online, regardless of the industry. IT is responsible for ensuring that this digital experience is smooth, simple, and bug-free, driving up customer satisfaction.
Managing talent: Every business depends on talented employees to succeed. IT makes sure these employees are equipped with the technologies and tools to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible. In addition, IT is also responsible for rolling out online portals that measure employee satisfaction, oversee employee goals and growth, and support employee reviews.
Leading sustainability efforts: IT can leverage AI and cloud strategically to lower a business’s carbon footprint. Reducing the number of data centers, optimizing infrastructure and business processes, and minimizing compute usage all help make a company more eco-friendly.
Today’s Budget Decisions Will Impact Companies for Years
As the economy slows, CEOs have to make tough budget decisions. But if they make cuts in the wrong areas, it will hamstring their businesses in the long run. While the market may be sluggish, this precarity is widely expected to be mild and brief. Investing in AI, the cloud and IT will not only help enterprises weather the storm but will also position them for rapid growth and innovation when the skies clear.
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