2024 Predictions: AI Innovation Meets Digital Resilience

Welcome to the era of AI. It’s the technology advancement that motivates and excites me every day as a CTO. Generative AI is already transforming many areas of our lives, from helping us write emails to assisting us with customer service. What waits for us on the immediate horizon?

Today, we released our annual predictions series. Splunk’s 2024 Predictions features three editions: Executive, Security and Observability. Each year, Splunk senior leaders and technologists forecast trends and share insights for the future of business, security, IT and engineering. You shouldn’t be surprised that this year, my colleagues and I emphasized the disruption — and value — of AI.

We predict that AI will generate many opportunities and some challenges. No doubt, AI will shape our world indefinitely, impacting every function and industry. Our experts explore some of the most likely outcomes. And if my team and I have our way, some of those outcomes will soon become reality.

AI made quite a splash this year. In the future, it’s bound to make waves.

How Executive Leaders Prepare for our AI Future

Every year business and technology leaders confront a maze of operational and regulatory obstacles. 2024 will be no different. In fact, AI will present additional challenges. In Executive Predictions 2024, we discuss how AI will fuel a new wave of data privacy regulation that will fracture regional laws and create headaches for companies looking to roll out AI-driven solutions. Governments around the world also continue to impose strict resilience mandates. Because of the changing regulatory landscape, we’ll see board priorities and C-suite roles transform as well. Technology leaders must learn and adopt best practices and strategies to operate through digital disruptions and will need to rely heavily on AI-driven security and observability applications. In 2024, you will need both the right tools and the right leadership in place to weather any storm.

We predict that one day, AI-driven automation and productivity tools will forever change the way organizations operate. This includes using AI-driven tools for dealing with risk and compliance. While in the short term, business leaders remain reluctant about wide-scale adoption, in the long term, they are building strategies to incorporate AI into their business models to maintain a competitive edge.

AI: The Double-Edged Sword for Security

AI will have the greatest impact on security, benefiting both the defenders and the attackers. In Security Predictions 2024, we predict that next year, security professionals and cyber criminals alike will exploit AI. CISOs and security teams will use AI-powered automation to alleviate skills gaps and build a more proactive security posture. AI co-pilots or assistants will become prevalent for both administrative and deeply technical tasks.

Meanwhile, criminals and bad actors will weaponize AI to carry out malicious attacks, fraud, and influence campaigns. Moreover, AI will likely lower the entry barrier for script kiddies and amateur hackers who would otherwise have limited access to the cyber underworld.

While AI can benefit many organizations, it also represents an additional attack surface with new attack vectors, allowing cyber adversaries to launch a new category of attacks from AI poisoning to disinformation. Next year, expect cyber criminals to use AI to create more sophisticated deep fakes, craft better social engineering attacks and deploy more evasive malware.

The good news? Detecting and mitigating the impact of these attacks requires the same approach security leaders already know: comprehensive visibility across their environments coupled with processes to detect, respond and remediate.

The AI Revolution in IT and Engineering

As companies mature in their digital transformation, more and more digital exhaust is collected and monitored. In fact, machine data is becoming so voluminous that more processing power is being pushed to the edge to enable early filtering and processing. IT and engineering professionals will increasingly leverage AI to mitigate the lack of human capacity to keep pace with the influx of data. We are already seeing companies apply machine learning and AI to anomaly detection and some are already doing this at the edge. In Observability Predictions 2024, my fellow Splunk IT and engineering leaders predict that soon, AI technologies will transform investigation and automated response, giving rise to automated remediation (while still keeping humans in the loop).

Resilience for the Future Starts Today

The meteoric rise of generative AI caught many of us off guard. It is here to stay and its influence will only grow: Gartner compares generative AI’s impact on technology to that of the steam engine, electricity and the internet. And while we find ourselves still at the early stages of implementation, organizations must prepare for an AI-driven future. Our recommendations?

• Business leaders must act now to assess the benefits of AI for their operations and understand the timeline for expected ROI. Read our Executive Predictions 2024 for insights from Splunk executive leaders.
• To keep pace with cyberattacks, security professionals must use AI to both elevate their organization’s security posture and relieve labor shortages in cybersecurity. Learn how from Spunk’s security team in our Security Predictions 2024.
• In response to security practitioners' demand for telemetry data as context for security events, solution vendors will need to make observability and security increasingly interoperable. Combining observability and security will enable organizations to build and maintain a more robust resilience profile. Read our Observability Predictions 2024 for insights from our IT and engineering leaders.

Are you ready for 2024? We are. Download all three Splunk Predictions Reports today.