Tech in 2024: The top 10 tech trends to watch closely this year

Every year, the landscape of technology is different, and it’s our job to keep on top of it. In this article, we cover the emerging trends that will shape the global landscape over the next year, and what you can expect.

If you're interested in learning about where to upskill yourself, your team, or your business, we'd also recommend checking out Pluralsight's Year in Tech 2023. In it, we break down the last twelve months of tech trends to help you know where to focus your energies in 2024.

1. There will be a more mature offering of AI products and services
2. The AI market leaders will start to surface
3. There will be a chatbot in nearly everything
4. We’ll get more open-source and ethical AI options
5. The motto of 2024 will be “Cybersecurity or Die”
6. Organizations will suddenly be desperate to clean data
7. There will be more code translators, wider language support
8. Work will be more abstracted, more low and no-code options
9. Businesses will remember the cloud exists
10. Human intelligence will become vital for organizations

Since ChatGPT dropped in November 2022, every tech company has been in a mad rush to integrate AI into their products, or offer it themselves. Now that people have had over a year to catch up, expect a flood of highly competitive AI offerings. 

We’re already starting to see it in the cloud space (Azure and AWS are going head to head on AI), but in 2024 this will extend to every conceivable field, because AI can benefit customers in pretty much every industry.

Expect there to be a lot more multimodal generative AI options as every company tries to outdo each other in this area in 2024. Read our article on why things are likely moving towards an omnimodal future.

There will be a lot of fierce competition in 2024 as we start to get a clearer idea of who is going to wind up with market share for AI-related products and services in 2025 and beyond. Once we get to that point, it will be more difficult for newcomers to come in and compete with these more mature offerings.

2024 will be the year of “Do you want a chatbot with that?” This is because the lowest hanging fruit for businesses will be conversational chatbots and virtualized assistants. They’re the most obvious application to help with customer service, and they’re fairly easy to implement with tools like Amazon Lex and Azure AI Bot Service. Technologists who are under pressure to “start using AI” will likely start here, and expand outwards.

For consumers, this means you’ll start seeing chatbots pop up in everything in 2024, perhaps to the point you even get sick of them!

Ethical consumerism is very important for Gen Z and Millenials, who prioritize social and environmental responsibility (Gen Z in particular are more risk averse). Given the choice between openly ethical AI options and products that were created questionably, they’ll likely choose the former. This will be an increasingly important market differentiator for AI companies in 2024 (Anthropic and Claude AI are ahead of the curve, here).

Many tech professionals also hate to be tied down to closed source solutions and prohibitively expensive subscriptions. As companies like Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Nvidia, and Google try to rope in customers, there will be a counter movement of open source alternatives. Given some corporations need intimate knowledge of how ethically an AI was built and a need to have control over it, open source will definitely be in demand.

In 2024, bad actors will be able to create cyber threats with next to no effort: people will be able to ask chatbots to make viruses or phishing letters, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to create incredibly powerful malware. While the motto of 2023 was “AI or Die”, the motto for 2024 will be “Cybersecurity or Die.”

Expect this sentence in 2024: “We really need to clean our business data.” Rather than it being a matter of data hygiene, this will be a matter of critical importance, since companies will be trying to get business insights from data using AI, and the insights will be only as good as the data you’ve got on hand.

On a low level, businesses will be inputting business data into tools like ChatGPT and processing it for quick insights with data analysis. On a bigger scale, organizations will be using tools like Amazon Q to get sophisticated insights across all their business data. Again, someone’s going to have to clean it up!

Ever swore about having to update the version of your code to a newer version, or wanted to switch it to a new language entirely? AI is going to be a big help here, and we’ve already seen things like Amazon Q that can upgrade Java 8 and Java 11 code to Java 17 code. In 2024, we’ll see more support for a greater spectrum of languages, not just obvious ones like Python.

In 2023, AI was being used to abstract away tactical parts of people’s roles, and there will be a whole service offering around this in 2024 onward. You’ve got AI-powered coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, and AWS CodeWhisperer, as well as tools like Amazon Q, which can provide architectural advice for your workloads. 

Even making AI can be no code, with options like Azure Machine Learning Studio, which is pretty much drag and drop. We’ll see more low and no-code services, more SDKs, more AI assistants for every conceivable task. In 2024, all of this will cascade into abstracting away work for non-technical roles as well, such as customer service, graphic design, finance, teaching, and more.

With all the excitement about AI (though largely justified), organizations will remember that cloud computing services are still as essential to drive customer value in 2024 as they were in 2020.

As organizations try and capitalize on AI in 2024, they’ll need people who can actually use them, according to Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard.

“Artificial intelligence, like any technology, still relies on human intelligence,” he said. “So if you want to get the most out of AI, you need people with the skills to leverage that technology and who have the other skills you need important to your business.”

“It's those people will understand the benefits that AI can bring to their functions, and ultimately unlock them for your organization… It’s human intelligence that will use AI to differentiate your organization, drive the real use cases of today, and uncover the transformative business applications of tomorrow.”

Read our Year in Tech 2023 report to get 12 months worth of technology insights: the top trending technologies, most popular and highest paying programming languages, the best web frameworks and AI-assisted coding tools to use, and more.