Introduction

It’s been a month since the IDC CIO Summit Middle East 2024 on 21st-22nd Feb, and I thought now is a good time to write up some of my thoughts of the event and the main themes that I saw. Firstly, it was an extremely well organized event, with some entertaining introductory pieces on Day 1 with Mind2Mind magicians performing their acts and hosting throughout the day! Anyway, let’s get into the main three themes that I picked up on during the event and give some of my thoughts.

AI

Need I say more really? There shouldn’t be any surprise whatsoever that AI was a huge part across the entire event. GenAI has lit the industry on fire and already rapidly changed the way companies are operating. This ranges from the way organizations are thinking of structuring themselves (e.g. is there now a need for a Chief AI Officer, or should it be baked in somewhere else? What is the correct governance model?) to their approaches for solving problems (e.g. utilizing Copilot for coding efficiencies, to a number of ChatBots for support purposes resulting in huge time savings).

AI is obviously here to stay, and I feel the next 5-10 years will be pivotal as technologies mature around AI and the right practices are put in place to govern AI usage in industry.

Data

There is an ever growing need to govern data – organizations are now generating more data than ever before and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to gain valuable insights from their data warehouses or data lakes.

There were a number of service providers looking to make this easier for organizations, offering services ranging from full data ingestion to data analysis. I think a growth area here will certainly be utilizing AI technologies to gain valuable insights from large pools of data. There were some use cases already there, but there is some way to go before organizations will adopt these to really give them value.

Cyber Security

It shouldn’t be any surprise that Cyber Security remains a huge theme at technology events, and probably more so with the introduction of AI technologies. I think this will continue being a space that’ll grow as technology is used more and more in different and innovative ways. It also remains to be seen as to what sorts of security mechanisms are required to deal with AI threats.

Low Code Platforms

This one took me a little by surprise. I have known about No-Code and Low-Code Platforms for some time but I personally did not see them as scalable solutions for enterprises. But it seems that they have progressed greatly over the past 5-10 years and are now capable of building fully featured applications ready for production use.

I think there is a real future here with the combination of AI to increase the time to market drastically, where AI can be coupled with Low-Code platforms to rapidly accelerate the build. This will be an interesting space to see, and I’ll be keeping an eye on how the future of software development itself will be impacted.

In Closing

We’re living in one of the most exciting times of recent memory with technology developments happening extremely quickly. It was no surprise that AI was a huge part of the summit, starting right from the keynote through to the end. It’ll be interesting to see how AI is adopted by organizations and how it is governed.

We have an exciting future ahead of us!