You know it’s important to keep up with emerging technologies for your business, but it’s not always easy. In this blog, we share our tips and steps to take to stay current with changing technologies, not as a one-time thing but as a continual best practice.
Our knowledge of and experience with leading-edge technologies – particularly with AI-based solutions, including AI’s most advanced incarnation, generative AI – is one big reason our clients hire us. If our consultants are going to effectively help those clients realize the full potential of their business processes, they need a strategy to stay current with the latest and best technology products and services coming onto the market.
That imperative also extends to business leaders who make or sign off on the decisions to purchase and deploy the technologies their companies need to innovate, improve, establish, and ensure the highest possible operational efficiency throughout the enterprise. To stay ahead of the curve, people at the C-level and those below need to commit to continuous learning. This process involves ongoing education about the latest and most versatile digital tools being developed and implemented.
If you want to fulfill that commitment, you need a well-designed program to stay current with emerging technologies.
A Planning Approach to Keep Abreast of Things
No matter what business or industry you’re in, you must figure out what technologies are important to the services you deliver and then make a plan to get — and stay — smart about them.
Our best practices at Centric Consulting are identifying and focusing on the core capabilities and offerings that we take to market for our clients based on our understanding of what emerging technologies businesses need today. We’re big in areas such as custom development, system integration, big data applications, e-commerce platforms, and all things AI that drive enterprise growth and business process improvement. We’re constantly looking for new information on these topics so we can offer the thought leadership and implementation expertise and guidance our clients need.
You can also spend time with people on the front lines of tech. For us, these people typically are our software architects. Find these people in your company, attend their meetings, and pick their brains about their latest projects. Ask them to show you some code or share their thoughts on the latest technology developments in their space.
To find out what will work for you, look at specific steps that have worked for industries across the board.
Putting Proven Practices in Place
The most effective strategies for refreshing and expanding your corporate tech awareness should involve a well-defined set of practices that become commonplace in the C-suite (and, indeed, at all levels of business leadership). Here are a few recommendations:
- Horizon scanning. This process refers to monitoring changes in technology and disruption. While it would be difficult for people within your workforce to track this, new tools in AI and programming are making it possible to build insight-yielding dashboards around specific areas of technological interest.
- Hire tech-aware personnel. Look for, recruit, and hire knowledgeable operational excellence people who can be vigilantly aware of technology changes affecting every part of a business. They can make the best recommendations about what technologies to import into the business as it scales, and they’ll know how to implement those technologies.
- Create an internal role. Closely related to the above point, identify in-house technology experts or advocates and charge them with providing pertinent updates on technology innovations. Establishing this process is an invaluable aid for business leaders, who generally don’t have the time or expertise to monitor and understand emerging technology developments.
- Network with your peers. There is no substitute for cultivating a network of other industry leaders to learn about new technology trends and introductions. In that vein, look outside of your building, so to speak. The corollary to peer networking is to expand your contacts with the outside world, including startups, crowd talent, media, academia, and other disrupters who can catalyze what’s next in technology.
- Lead the charge to learn about and implement change. If you want to learn about and implement the new technologies changing your industry, then lead that change. How? Have your team focus on thought leadership, educating your audience through institutional newsletters, industry articles, blogs, e-books, white papers, webinars, and conference presentations, among other things. This keeps you in the know and empowers you to keep your industry in the know.
- Make cybersecurity top-of-mind. Execute all the above steps with one overarching consideration: Do these solutions strengthen or potentially weaken a company’s security stance? Do they contribute to or detract from its ability to cope with the barrage of cyber threats increasing in volume, complexity, and intelligence even as you read this blog? In any technology adoption, security ought to be a designed-in consideration, not something added on as an afterthought later.
You may be wondering: What about AI? AI is at the top of the class when it comes to keeping current with the latest technologies, so much so that it needs its own approach.
AI: An Entirely Different Level of Keeping Up With Emerging Technologies for Business
Given the almost exponential pace of change in AI technology developments, businesses must answer two questions to successfully navigate the AI technology learning curve: How is AI going to impact their industry, and how can they use AI technologies in a secure, safe, and appropriate manner?
The answers involve staying caught up with what your competitors are doing with AI and determining how AI can be a differentiator for you. Can it help you accelerate product development and, hence, go-to-market debuts, improve internal operational efficiency, or open up new markets? (A word about competitors: Be aware of what they’re doing, but don’t reflexively assume you ought to follow suit. Check out their results first.)
Hand in hand with keeping up with new AI technologies, be honest about whether your company has obsolete legacy infrastructure systems in place that would thwart you from using AI to your benefit. Do you need to modernize core business capabilities and, if so, what does that entail? Perhaps it’s making your applications portfolio cloud-native. Or maybe it’s adopting a data consolidation and governance strategy that lets you build new AI-centric business processes to effectively use the data you’re moving and transforming.
Businesses that want to learn about and maximize the newest and best AI technologies should consider building networks of trusted consulting partners with whom they share their business and technology objectives. This will position their partners to give them the best advice about what’s out there and what new tools they should implement for optimal effect.
One of our clients, a bank in one of the plains states, took this route. They included Centric in such a network and told us their plans going forward – i.e., how many mergers and acquisitions they wanted to do and how much they wanted to shorten their loan origination process. Knowing these key business drivers and related technology action items helped us help them.
Generative AI is in an Emerging Technology League of Its Own
The potential applications for AI’s most ambitious and sophisticated functionality, generative AI, are immense and unlimited. But so is the potential for taking an uninformed, scattershot approach to all the shiny new generative AI toys (so to speak) and misusing them. Getting this right – not simply knowing what’s new but knowing what will work for a given business – involves identifying possible business process inefficiencies and determining how generative AI tools can use data on hand to develop new or revised processes that yield improvements. In other words, what are the problems, and what are the use cases where generative AI would be the solution?
What puts generative AI at the top of the AI pyramid is its power to generate content in many different formats and its ability to replicate the thinking processes of key business role players so that it can effectively perform tasks related to those roles and anticipate the proper responses to customer inquiries, requests or complaints.
Businesses looking to see what generative AI tools are coming onto the market should keep in mind how those tools can put these two distinguishing features to work in ways that are relevant to your specific operational needs. One more thing: Be wary of relying on existing large language models – whose data may not be relevant to your operations – and, instead, create your own models with data that truly is pertinent to your businesses. Otherwise, you may discover those new AI solutions may yield unsatisfactory results.
Again, there’s a lot of new generative AI stuff out there, and more and more of it is constantly coming out. The temptation is to be like a kid in a candy store, where you want at least one of everything. But the learning and purchasing process must be formulaic, and the formula is this:
- Which business processes do your generative AI investments support?
- How do you deploy them ethically and legally?
- How do you reap maximum value from them?
- How can you help your employees adopt these tools into their daily workflow?
One answer many organizations are considering entails creating a chief AI officer (CAIO) or similar role that closely surveys and analyzes the new AI technologies and assesses how those tools may improve their business. That’s particularly appropriate for industries, such as healthcare, where data privacy is critical. The CAIO ought to head up a steering committee, with representation from departments such as compliance, legal, IT, finance, and marketing, that identifies the potential risks and rewards of any new technology investments and whose findings guide the CAIO’s action plan.
Businesses also need to consult credible sources of information about AI to understand what’s going on. Fortunately, there are effective ways to access a treasure trove of news and insights about the latest AI advancements.
- Attend a variety of events and group interchanges to gather intelligence. There are informative online AI forums where researchers engage in detailed discussions about things such as neural networks. Industry conferences and workshops are a great way to hear about cutting-edge AI applications and innovations from top researchers and practitioners. AI community discussions provide a lively give-and-take about emerging trends and breakthroughs.
- Learn by doing to open you up to new AI technology possibilities for your firm. Platforms such as Product Hunt and There’s an AI for That can help you discover new AI tools, which you can then have your project or section leads implement in pilot projects so that you can assess firsthand how effective they are and if they effectively align with your business objectives. Similarly, you can also have your people perform hands-on experiments, where they test tools to see if and how they work and get an understanding of their real-world applications.
- Content on AI happenings is abundant, too. Medium, the OpenAI Blog, and LinkedIn provide a wealth of information in this regard, and business newspapers like the Economic Times are full of articles about how AI and AI-related operations policies are impacting different industries. An app called Newsletterss provides access to many AI-themed newsletters, while the AI Journal summarizes key AI trends in the marketplace. Training- and development-oriented newsletters regularly deliver rich content on emerging AI technologies and tools.
Continual-Learning Resources to Keep Up with Emerging Technologies for Business
There are reliable, authoritative resources that you can consult to bump up and update your tech knowledge base.
The Gartner Group provides excellent information on IT strategy and governance, regardless of the industry involved. It is available in one of three ways – for free, through a subscription fee, or with a Gartner membership. IT leaders, particularly if they’re in highly regulated industries, also should identify information sources that are specific to their industries for more guidance and insights.
Some other helpful reference materials include the annual Gallup State of the Global Workplace, the annual Microsoft Work Trend Index report, and the annual IBN Cost of a Data Breach report, which focuses specifically on cyber threats.
As you have seen, riding the new technology information wave (instead of being swamped by it) is an attention-consuming job in itself, not an afterthought.
Make the Whole Process a Dedicated Function
Keeping up with the technology Joneses, so to speak, isn’t something that businesses can do as an add-on to their core business objectives, policies and operations. You must apportion time, personnel and hardware and software resources on a dedicated basis to get the information you need to know what are the vanguard technologies that will help you thrive today and tomorrow.
