Top 3 AI trends to tackle cybercrime and bolster productivity in 2024

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, it’s not only global markets grappling with the unsettling reality of cybercrime. In Africa and the Middle East, the threat of cybercrime is on the rise, with the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 suggesting that 86% of organisations across these regions experienced at least one ransomware attack last year.

With AI quickly proving its worth in driving efficiency and productivity, as organisations head into the new year, they need to be aware of three top trends that will help them meet their business goals while ensuring their data defences are up to the challenge imposed by cyber criminals.

● Building trust, mitigating risks, and ensuring security with AI TRiSM

With the rise of AI, studies conducted by Gartner suggest that while 45% of organisations are piloting generative AI solutions and 10% have already put generative AI solutions into production, AI models and applications must be more reliable, trustworthy and secure.

It is imperative to implement solutions to proactively identify and manage the risks that come along with this technology. At the core of this is a comprehensive AI trust, risk, and security management (TRiSM) program that assists in integrating essential governance from the start. It also allows businesses to take proactive steps to guarantee their systems adhere to regulations, are reliable and safeguard data privacy.

Organisations should not engage in unfocused experimentation of the technology without a clear direction. This is to ensure sustained impact after investing in the technology. All efforts must be intentional and yield reliable results. Moreover, they need to be realistic about their return on investment in the technology by factoring in the necessary proactive measures from the start, while crafting all innovations with a mindset of being able to reuse them in the future.

● Innovate faster with AI-augmented development

In recent years, the adoption of AI solutions has skyrocketed, marking a transformative shift in the industry. So much so that statistics indicate that by 2025, as many as 30% of organisations will have implemented an AI-augmented development and testing strategy – a significant leap from a mere 5% in 2021.

AI presents the potential to automate many of the tedious and often time-consuming tasks in the software development sector, enabling engineers to produce code quicker and more efficiently than ever before.

To unlock its full potential, software engineers can leverage generative AI for code creation and comprehension and deploy it as a tool for app modernisation. Moreover, generative AI can identify, explain, and measure technical debt and its impact, while playing a pivotal role in meeting user demands for AI-driven products and services. It can also be useful for delivering seamless and successful software testing.

● Drive efficiency through an augmented connected workforce

Striving for greater levels of efficiency and productivity, the augmented connected workforce aims to foster innovative problem-solving and decision-making. It is a strategy that optimises the value of human workers, fuelled by the need to accelerate, and scale talent.

It uses intelligent applications and workforce analytics to provide everyday context and guidance to support the workforce’s experience, well-being, and ability to develop their own skills. At the same time, it drives business results for key stakeholders within the organisation.

Its popularity is growing exponentially, with Gartner suggesting that by 2027, 25% of CIOs will make use of this to reduce time by up to 50% for key roles.

Where to from here?

While it is important to be cognisant of the growing trends in the AI sphere in 2024, it’s equally as important for the channel to retain focus on what some may deem to be essentials in the industry, including harnessing the skills to succeed, as well as the solutions at hand to ensure productivity and efficiency.

With studies proving that the lack of human talent and human failure is responsible for over half of significant cyber-attacks, it begs the question – what skills should organisations look for in cybersecurity experts?

Despite employees needing to be astute in technical skills such as programming, an understanding of libraries and frameworks, natural language processing and computer vision, and an aptitude for data science and analytics, organisations mustn’t forget the soft skills required to succeed. These include the likes of problem-solving, and knowledge of AI and how it functions, among others.

With cybercrime and AI simultaneously evolving at a rapid pace, it’s important to partner with solutions providers that are committed to unlocking greater value for customers and accelerating business transformation with data that’s always available. This includes ones that are constantly solving problems and looking for opportunities to help businesses de-risk, recover faster, and achieve radical resilience. Moreover, the channel is increasingly important to advance customer resiliency through data security, data recovery, and data freedom for their hybrid cloud strategy.

The future is never certain, but we do know one thing for sure: cybercrime will not go away. By harnessing the potential of technologies such as AI and utilising them correctly with support from a reliable channel partner, organisations of all sizes and sectors can bolster their data defences to mitigate the risk of attacks, and even “bounce forward” from an outage or data loss scenario