Three Technology Megatrends That Every Business Leader Needs to Plan for

By Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Labs, HPE Fellow and VP, FIEEE

Ask any C-level executive about the top 10 trends on their radar screen, and it’s likely that artificial general intelligence (AGI), sustainability, and digital transformation will make their list. By upskilling for those three, corporate HR professionals can ensure that they’re well equipped to support not only organization-wide needs but also those of their own department.

That outlook is based on the IEEE’s latest Technology Megatrends report, which identified the top three to watch in 2024 and beyond:

• AGI will continue accelerated growth in assisting humans at work and demanding ever-increasing sources of energy.
• Sustainability of new data centers with innovative energy sources will complement shifting workloads across geo-boundaries to increase decarbonization and water consumption.
• Digital transformation will embrace augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) to complement ensemble technologies with a focus on those that could or may be automated at scale.

Currently, the most common type of AGI is generative AI, such as Azure AI, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Gen AI’s capabilities and use cases create a host of HR considerations. For instance, HR can help IT craft an organization-wide set of policies and best practices to avoid known problems such as using data that results in gender or racial bias.

In addition to helping the organization achieve its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals, there is a strong business case for avoiding bias: It can undermine a product’s revenue potential if the AGI produces a design that doesn’t resonate with some members of the target market. One example is smartphone apps sold into Sub-Saharan Africa that were not optimized for that market. Instead of avatars that reflected the diversity of people living there, particularly black women, they were optimized for the white males who designed the apps and who were the primary users in other regions.

Some AGI applications involve analyzing data about people, such as employees, students, or patients. In those cases, another potential policy is requiring all data to be anonymized before AGI tools are allowed to ingest it. Depending on the country, this anonymization may be required by law, such as under GDPR for European Union members.

Data that doesn’t involve people also may need to be stripped of identifying characteristics. One example is a truck manufacturer that wants to use AGI to understand the performance and health of its delivery vehicles over time. The data from those embedded Internet of Things (IoT) modules shouldn’t include information that could be used to identify delivery routes and stops.

HR can also help educate all employees about which AGI tools have been vetted and approved for use. This helps avoid problems such as proprietary company or client data being stored in a public cloud and/or used by the gen AI vendor to train its large language models (LLMs). It also helps avoid unnecessary costs such as departments or individual employees using their budget to pay directly for gen AI tools rather than ones the company already subscribes to.

Read More : Managing Flexible Work Without the Headaches

All Together Now

It’s important to note that the three megatrends are interrelated rather than siloed. For example, AGI uses enormous amounts of data and compute resources. Digital transformation also enables and uses AGI. That means those two megatrends directly affect sustainability because it takes more and more electricity to power and cool those data centers.

To achieve sustainability goals, such as carbon neutrality, organizations may need to increase their use of solar, wind, and hydro. They also may need to step up their energy-efficiency plans outside of IT to offset the additional usage, such as with AI-powered smart building technologies that automatically adjust the temperature and ventilation in conference rooms based on the number of attendees, the amount of sunlight coming through windows and the heat ventilated by AV equipment such as projectors.

All of these megatrend examples highlight the importance of upskilling. For example, HR can’t help craft AGI policies and best practices unless it’s up to speed on all the capabilities and risks that come with these tools. These skills also enable HR to speak the same language as IT when helping create and enforce policies and best practices.

That’s a lot to think about, which highlights why it’s important for HR to prioritize. Each manufacturer, school district, hospital, insurance company, and other types of organization will have its timelines for implementing the individual technologies driving these megatrends.

For example, some are starting to implement gen AI today but won’t use other forms of AGI for a few more years. Some organizations are starting to develop sustainability strategies while others have had theirs in place for years. By understanding the roadmap for company-wide initiatives, as well as its departmental use cases, HR can determine which megatrend-enabling technologies it needs to focus on this year and which ones to start planning for in 2025.

Read More: HRTech Interview with Dr. Autumn Krauss, Chief Scientist at SAP SuccessFactors

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