The Forrester Technology & Innovation Summit has become a regular rite of fall. The event brings together many of Forrester’s leading analysts as well as several hundred practitioners from across the Fortune 500 and beyond. True to Forrester’s tagline, Bold at Work, the Summit is a forum for big ideas and data-backed insights. There was much to take in, digest, and discuss at this year’s event. Here are a few highlights that caught our attention.
The Road to Artificial General Intelligence
In the last few years, what began with generative AI has quickly advanced to agentic AI applications. Soon(ish), we’ll move toward Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. AGI has been the inspiration for hundreds of dystopian visions of the future. Forrester does not predict a malevolent super intelligence taking over the world, but Forrester’s Brian Hopkins does anticipate independently functioning AGI systems will be a reality in the next 5-10 years. AGI, which melds generative and agentic capabilities with the ability to create its own tools to achieve predefined goals, opens the door to limitless opportunities and perhaps a few cautions. It will be interesting to see this science fiction become reality.
Weaving an Agentic Business Fabric
Getting to the next stage of AI productivity will require the collaboration of AI agents and human expertise. Blending AI agents with human-in-the-loop oversight will unlock the next stage of workflow automation needed to unlock meaningful business outcomes. Dozens of tech players, from entrenched business application vendors to upstart custom agentic platforms, are vying to carve out their place in the tech ecosystem of the future. With no one vendor able to serve an enterprise’s complete needs, it will require strategic planning to fully take advantage of this new workplace paradigm.
People Matter
Speaking of human-in-the-loop processes, as the home of the Performance Commerce People, this is a theme that is near and dear to us. When it comes to creating an AI-ready organization, upskill your people now. Don’t try and backfill later. Skills can be learned. Wholesale (and sometimes performative) job cuts are a drain on institutional knowledge and negatively impact business continuity and culture.
Enabling Data Ecosystems
There’s broad consensus that data readiness is the most critical element to driving successful AI outcomes. A lot of effort has been made to collect vast stores of data in data lakes or data warehouses. Less effort has been applied to unlocking its value. The takeaway: Stop (just) collecting data. Start connecting data. Bringing disparate data sources together to create data networks is the key to future-proofing an organization’s AI journey.
New Approaches to Enterprise Architecture
New ways of working require new ways of approaching the infrastructure that enables enterprises to run complex operations at scale. Rather than getting lost in the technical semantics, curious Enterprise Architects are encouraged to dive into Principal Analyst Brent Ellis’ OASIS Framework for Outcome-Driven Infrastructure Platforms.
What’s The Next Big Thing?
The consensus amongst several analysts, marketers, and technologists we spoke to is that the next big thing, at least in terms of the hype machine, is quantum computing. Quantum, as it applies to commerce, is a topic that we’ve been exploring for a while now. Practical applications would seem to be at least a decade away, and let’s hope so. Because once quantum computing is available beyond a handful of Big Tech and University research labs, all forms of encryption currently used to keep transactions and personal data secure will become obsolete.