Industry Insights
2024: A Digital Storm Is Coming
Every year I write about what I saw across client engagements. This year, I’m writing about what’s ahead — because the signals are impossible to ignore.
The Signals
AI agents are no longer demos. They’re writing code, triaging support tickets, and generating analysis documents. In 2023, large language models were impressive novelties. In 2024, they became operational tools — embedded in development pipelines, customer service workflows, and decision support systems. The gap between “proof of concept” and “production” closed faster than anyone predicted.
The EU AI Act landed, and most organisations haven’t even read it. Regulatory compliance, which used to be a concern for financial services and healthcare, is now a universal constraint. Every organisation using AI — which increasingly means every organisation — needs to understand classification, risk assessment, transparency obligations, and documentation requirements. Most don’t.
Low-code platforms are merging with AI copilots. The tools that were already accelerating development are now being augmented with generative capabilities. A business analyst can describe a workflow in plain language and watch a platform scaffold it in minutes. The speed of solution creation is about to leap again.
Cloud costs are compounding. The migrations of 2020 and 2021 are now producing monthly bills that CFOs are questioning. Optimisation, governance, and FinOps have become critical disciplines — but most organisations are still treating cloud infrastructure as someone else’s problem.
The Storm
The storm isn’t AI itself. It isn’t regulation, or cloud costs, or platform convergence. The storm is what happens when the pace of technological change outstrips an organisation’s ability to analyse, decide, and deliver.
When every quarter brings a new platform capability, a new regulatory constraint, a new competitive threat — and your delivery methodology can’t keep up.
Meanwhile, the average enterprise is still running delivery the same way it did in 2018. Bloated discovery phases that produce shelf-ware, or sprint-and-pray agile that ships fast and fixes later. Neither approach was designed for a world that moves this fast.
The Pattern
I’ve seen this pattern before. In 2020, COVID exposed the organisations that had no structured way to adapt. Their governance models assumed physical presence. Their analysis processes assumed stable requirements. Their delivery frameworks assumed predictable timelines. When the ground shifted, they froze.
In 2023, the AI wave exposed the organisations that couldn’t articulate their own problems before reaching for solutions. They chased the technology because everyone else was chasing it. They started pilots without problem statements. They built demos that never became products.
The next wave will be faster, broader, and less forgiving. The convergence of AI agents, regulatory pressure, platform evolution, and cost constraints will create a pace of change that linear delivery models cannot absorb. Organisations that can’t move from problem identification to solution delivery in weeks — not months — will fall behind.
What Will Matter
The organisations that will thrive aren’t the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones with the clearest thinking between problem and solution — the ones who can move from analysis to delivery with confidence, not hope.
This has been the thread running through every post I’ve written since 2019. The technology landscape changed every year. The fundamental differentiator didn’t. Clear analysis. Structured design. Adaptive delivery. The organisations that had these capabilities survived COVID, navigated the AI hype, managed budget cuts, and delivered outcomes. The ones that didn’t have them lurched from one crisis to the next, always reacting, never quite in control.
Something needs to change in how we approach enterprise delivery. The gap between analysis and execution that I’ve been writing about for six years isn’t just an inefficiency anymore. In the world that’s coming, it’s an existential risk.
And I think I know what needs to change.
More on that soon.