Technology trends for 2024: Leaders' view on what to expect this year

Industry experts predict how GenAI, robots, virtual assistants will change the world

Rahul Chari, Co-founder & CTO, PhonePe

The year could redefine our understanding of connectivity and efficiency. I believe 2024 will be the year when multi-modal artificial intelligence (AI) will go mainstream. Multi modal means an integrated experience where inputs to generative AI can be in multiple forms and not just text. Imagine our current smartphone assistants but way smarter. I believe green data centres will go mainstream in 2024 with companies taking the pledge to battle climate change as well as the cost of renewable power coming down significantly. I am excited about new product categories in wearables. While smart watches and health have been through a few iterations, 2024 could be when mixed reality headsets go mainstream. This could be the year when an array of technologies in traditionally different categories come together seamlessly to create unique user experiences.

Kaivalya Vohra, Co-founder and CTO, Zepto

Kaivalya Vohra, Co-founder and CTO, Zepto

Going into the New Year, Zepto wants to digitise parts of our value chain to give us a lot more visibility. For instance, our fruits and vegetables side. We are looking at incorporating automation within some of the larger warehouses and fulfilment centres, bringing in some basic levels of robotics. On the customer side, where we have not invested too much  until recently, we are looking at further improvements. We are also working to improve recommendations. We are excited about edge computing. This involves running light-weight machine language models on a customer’s smartphone directly.

Raghu Krishnananda, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Myntra

Raghu Krishnananda, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Myntra

GenAI will be a key driver in enhancing consumer experience in fashion and beauty. In the apparel industry, its applications include transforming shopping bots into styling advisors, assisting designers, enabling faster issue resolution in customer care, and automating creatives for merchandising. Virtual Tryon is another promising technology in fashion e-commerce.

Sindhu Gangadharan, SVP & MD, SAP Labs India

Sindhu Gangadharan, SVP & MD, SAP Labs India

Technology is creating new opportunities for human advancement. Today, anyone can use Generative AI (GenAI), with little technical knowhow. In 2024, businesses leaders will look beyond the industry buzz for solutions that deliver real-life, AI-based use cases. GenAI for business will move from hype to reality. Businesses have always required relevant and reliable business results. That means they’ll need to find ways of combining GenAI with their specific data. Such data is notoriously complex and often sits in multiple systems, so there is a high risk of losing valuable context when they are extracted and combined. Since GenAI is only as valuable as the data it draws from, companies that can best combine their business data with generative AI to provide the strongest context to the models will have a significant edge.