Insights Six big things I’m thinking about

Six big things I’m thinking about

I’m constantly challenging myself to think about what’s next.  In a sense it is the only constant in the technology community… that our jobs and lives will continue to be shaped by the powerful opportunity that tech evolution presents.  If someone asked, “what do you care about right now?”, I might have a different answer every day, but I’ll start with these five as a framework of what I’m seeing in the industry at this moment:

Thing 1: The next 2 – 3 years of the AI journey

We’re certainly moving very fast in the AI space, but I think most underestimate just how fast.  Consider that the industrial revolution, air travel, the electrical system, and the internet all took many, many, years to enable productivity… the AI system is rapidly becoming an enabling technology across a wide diversity of use cases.  Is it going to have some mis-steps?  Absolutely.  The mistake would be the let the missteps cloud the moderate view that AI will change the world… not if… just when.  We know we’ll move from “peak inflated expectations” to some level of disappointment, but it’s important to keep well focused eyes as we move through that phase.  A lot is going to happen and will happen as some get distracted, including:

  • The advent of additional AI laws to govern foundational models and corporate use
  • Notable successes in AI value creation as lighthouses for other less assertive organizations
  • Stark failures of AI missteps that were not grounded in company strategy or reasonable goals
  • Rapid evolution of agentic capabilities and multi-agent structures for enterprise-class applications
  • Patterns and practices for agentic structures that bring governance to the picture
  • Availability of AI delegation as a skill necessary in every role
  • Industry-vertical-specific AI capabilities become normative
  • Non-intuitive insights will rapidly become a space for AI innovation
  • Software engineering will move from AI-assist to AI-delegated
  • Practical responsible AI continues to take form over theory

Thing 2: The Human Skilling Transition and Commoditization of AI Access

If we truly believe that AI is as important as the industrial revolution we need to realize the human transition will be just as significant and important.  The movement of upskilling and job-role integration will be critical to how we make the journey possible.  This isn’t just about technology skills, but about re-learning critical thinking and creative skills that were lost with many jobs.  I frankly believe that most think too small about the size of the transition and the level of enablement that is possible and required by AI as a tool.  A few things about this specifically:

  • The digital natives are already starting to use AI intuitively
  • Those already in the workforce will have the hardest transition, especially if delegation is not part of their role
  • For both digital natives and established professionals, new skills and mindsets will need to be unlocked
  • This isn’t just about “go to a class and come back an AI expert”, nor is it tech-only education
  • Be careful about “boot camps” that portent to make this switch
  • Be aware of the harms caused by AI tools as much as the benefits

The productivity stack will be the most important technology to making this real because it is part of what information workers use every day.   The infancy of this is what is available now in tech like M365 Copilot, but the next 2 – 3 years will accelerate quickly and those not making baby steps at present will need to make much bigger steps later.

Thing 3: The Mission of Your Business matters more than ever

The companies that really know why they exist will be tremendously successful.  There are many companies with missions that are written on the wall but never internalized by the employees.  The very nature of many businesses will be tested as digital start-ups are able to challenge established players.  The organizations who are able to step back, understand their mission, and disrupt themselves will be well positioned.  Those that are waiting or unable to apply that focus will be challenged to compete.

The most successful businesses are going to be those that can express the mission of their business through digital means and enable new experiences that meet customers where they are, not expect the customers to continue to use the well-worn paths of the past.  I’ve spoken about disruption before, but never has it been more relevant and purposeful by such a large quantity of companies.

When the dust settles, the companies standing will be those that thought about the end-in-mind and built a strategy that gets them there.  This is not a time to just “dink around”, but instead a time to be very intentional about what success looks like and the road to get there.

  • The outcome of any technology needs to be the acceleration of the business mission
  • Those that understand their mission apart from the “how” will be empowered
  • Those that are confined to established norms will need to intentionally break them
  • Those that are not thinking “big enough” need to step back
  • Technology is a scaling factor for a business that is existential to the business itself

Thing 4: Autonomous Agents on the Horizon

We usually think of technology in terms of things we’ve situated in our heads as “normal”.  We quickly forget that there was a time not so long ago where mobile devices didn’t exist, the internet wasn’t a thing, and ChatGPT felt ten years off.   The next phase will not only be agentic, but will move increasingly toward agents that are trusted to perform tasks on their own.  This will occur in both the digital space and the physical space (via generalized task-capable robotics).  We’ll need to determine where we are comfortable with this delegation and where not.  It’s clear that some tasks will be delegated to an AI agent before the technology is ready and that will cause a kerfuffle when it does.  The transition may start in benign use cases, such as drone piloting, household tasks, factory work, or information-worker task delegation.  The main thing to remember is that this is not just about “automation”, but true “delegation”, which makes the world of autonomous agents very different than what we experienced before.  A few additional thoughts here:

  • Autonomy is just that… what task can I give that I trust to get in return
  • Autonomy can exist in degrees… my five year old will clean a room and then I “check it”
  • Autonomy has a very high bar for many business use cases… think autonomous driving
  • Autonomy creates different expectations in the mind of the consumer that need to be managed
  • Autonomy will have an interesting affect on cheap coding where the AI agent can perform the same activity
  • Autonomy will hit home with manual work when it can reduce the “can’t find workers” issue in manual labor

Thing 5:  The number of apps created in the next 5 years will eclipse those created before

The possibilities of development will rapidly shift as language-based development is the main vehicle for creation instead of traditional coding.  This will blur the line between build vs. buy and the number of “apps” or autonomous delegations created that look like apps will explode.  This is already happening in the small website space or low-code business apps, where describing the application in human language is able to build the app and most of its components.  The next step in all this is to describe the business goal and not necessarily even the app.   This “way of creating” is a new skill not all that dissimilar from using Copilot to draft the first version of a document.

  • The cloud is an enabling factor in team readiness.  Time and time again, those that are leveraging cloud tech are more agile and able to make a difference
  • The concern of “shadow IT” vs. balanced enablement/governance needs to be discussed and accelerated in organizations.  I’ve heard the saying, “50% of nothing is still nothing”.  Those that lock down and put the stamp on innovation in the name of governance will ultimately have nothing to govern.  The opposite is also true… those that enable innovation without governance will be a news story (not in a good way) later
  • The app ecosystem still needs an architecture that unites everything together and ground is being gained on that, such as companies that have started to leverage Dataverse, Fabric, or an interconnected set of AI agents that all “talk” through a common approach.  Enterprise Architecture stands to provide the approach for this to be true and for value to be gained that is not individualized, but corporate in the extent to which it can be shared.
  • Cloud architectures for serverless are clearly going to continue to evolve and the efficiency of the hyperscale providers are going to influence an ever decreasing “cost-per-sip” in the race to the bottom.  They’ll all be working on building value in services that build on the established framework.

Thing 6:  Infrastructure is Increasingly Commoditized but Still REALLY Matters

You are not a special snowflake.  The more I see companies that think they are and build their infrastructures accordingly the more I see they are establishing a kingdom that is increasingly limited in who can support it.  I had a recent conversation with a PE firm that went like this… “when I evaluate an acquisition I can tell immediately the technology state of the business by the extent to which they leverage the cloud”.  This was true for both the tech itself, the alignment to the business, and the skills of the team.  Increasingly a dependence on legacy on-premise environments is looked at as a liability by PE firms, even if it is perceived as costing less.  A legacy environment is looked at as a PE as something they will no doubt need to modernize to achieve new business value.

The adoption of commodity capabilities where possible and especially those that “work together” is a win, not only for staff modernization, but especially for establishing patterns that “anyone” can operate.  At this point when you see the Frankenstein monster of IT you immediately understand why a company has the number of staff it does.

All of this said… remember that infrastructure still matters and having people who can support it, understand it, and respond to it are critical.  Just a few weeks ago with the Crowdstrike disaster woke up CIOs to the competency and capability of their IT teams on basic blocking and tackling.

Questions to ask yourself:

  • Do I have a plan to move to SaaS for code services?
  • Do I understand my EDGE needs in the context of those SaaS services?
  • Do I have a plan to get to commoditized end user computing?
  • Are my server infrastructure staff cloud-native?
  • Do I have an established FinOps practice?
  • Do I have a pattern for DevSecMLOps across the enterprise?
  • How well do I understand the core business apps and what is needed to support them?

So, why are these my six big things?  Each of these represent how a company needs to be thinking about technology and how it reflects it in actual outcomes in the business.  How are YOU making these a reality in your business?

Nathan Lasnoski