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At the start of November, the UK Government held its inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, the former home to the team of code breakers led by the “father of AI and computer science” Alan Turning, that deciphered the German enigma code in WWII.

The location of the summit is symbolic, as many articles at the time highlighted. It shows how far technology, computer science, data analytics and AI have come in short time. And how far they will go in the future.

In 2024, overall spending on IT is set to grow by about 8%; a total of around $5.1 trillion. Of that,  business intelligence spending is expected to rise by almost 14%.

There will of course be many developments over the coming year, and one trend that stands out for 2024 is certainly AI (which we’ve written about here). But for me, the new ways that sectors like food production and retail can take advantage of technology, and all organisations’ massively increased visibility will be important trends too.

AI assistants

The boom in AI has been accelerating this year and the biggest and most important development has been in natural language processing (NLP). Thanks to the ability of large language models (LLMs), AI applications can “understand” conversational language like a person can. We’ve all played around with ChatGPT and we’re all impressed.

The impacts of this for business intelligence are significant because it allows non-technical team members to interact with data in a conversational way. Employees don’t need to know SQL to manipulate a database, they can just ask an AI to do it in the same way they’d ask a colleague.

We’re seeing how co-pilot features from Microsoft (as part of the new Fabric platform) GitHub, and now ChatGPT have created a “store” for people to build their own GPTs. The era of AI assistants is picking up speed, and business will soon be able to take full advantage of them. Think Microsoft Word Clippy, but actually helpful and intelligent.

New tech in retail and farming

We’ve helped several companies in farming and agriculture to get the most from their data, along with many companies in the retail, leisure, and hospitality sectors. These industries could see interesting expansions of their abilities as new technologies become more accessible.

For example, farming and agriculture are seen as “traditional” and not the quickest on the uptake of new technologies. But there’s evermore technology that can help farms address their daily and seasonal challenges.

One such technology is edge computing for IoT devices. Edge computing allows for essentially real-time turnaround of data that is collected, processed, and transmitted in an instant. Across the value-chain, this helps farmers stay informed about their operations.

In the experience industries, like retail, hospitality, and leisure, new technologies such as artificial reality (AR) could also soon start to make an impact. It will almost certainly change the way that people interact with products and services online, because companies will be able to offer “virtual replicas” before people purchase them. Think visualizing furniture or new paint in your house.

Massively increased visibility

New technologies, whatever they are, remind me of the Tesco Clubcard. If they’re used correctly, they’re a chance to collect vast amounts of data with the potential for transformative insights into organisations’ operations. If companies can set up the processes and systems to exploit their new data, then they’ll have massively increased visibility into their customers, products, and performance.

Take the AI example. If companies can exploit AI as a source of data as well as an assistant, to find out what queries are mostly performed and on what datasets, then this can give them additional insight into the needs of their employees. They may need to start collecting data from new sources, or they may need to offer training in certain areas.

Similarly, using edge computing and IoT devices, farmers can get faster insight into growing areas of their businesses. Retailers too will now have the ability to gather customer data from a new source. When coupled with the right BI systems, this will give them more visibility than before.

Whatever the new technologies are, the consequence is going to be greatly increased visibility. Like I said last year, having the BI set up to take advantage of the data coming out of new technologies will be like switching on the light. This year, those technologies will make it a little brighter.

To get an idea of where your organisation is at, and where you could take your business intelligence in the new year, explore our BI health check here.