Managing CEO expectations is this year’s Priority No. 1
4. Real reality is under siege
By now you, your parents, your cousin Felix the would-be social media influencer, not to mention your CEO, will all know all about deepfakes.
4. Real reality is under siege
By now you, your parents, your cousin Felix the would-be social media influencer, not to mention your CEO, will all know all about deepfakes. What they won’t expect, because the credulous business writers they rely on haven’t figured it out, is that in 2024 deepfake content will begin filtering into the training datasets that make AI I. Yes, in the coming year we’re likely to find ourselves dealing with fake deepfakes.
So while your CEO might be hoping that generative AI and its ability to search vast volumes of information will help them understand their corner of the world better, they’ll be disappointed. Maybe they will get better data-driven insights. What they’ll need but probably won’t get are AI-based deepfake detectors, so they aren’t fooled by generative-AI-driven deceptions.
5. The cloud will save money
Okay, fair’s fair and fun’s fun. But few CEOs will be completely consumed by these semi-whimsical depictions of information technology’s future. They’ll continue to have practical concerns, too, like where all the money is that cloud computing was supposed to save them. Some disappointments, that is, are both evergreen and rooted in real reality. To the extent the cloud exists in some sort of reality, its promise to save money is one of them.
Why will it disappoint, once again in 2024? Because the cloud never did, and still won’t make sense as a general-purpose cost-saving measure.
It won’t because you can buy servers as cheaply as the cloud providers, and they need to add a profit margin when they charge you for using them.
What you should promise instead: Unlike on-premises infrastructure, the cloud lets IT easily add capacity in small increments when demand requires it. And — and this is the biggie — it also lets IT shed capacity when it isn’t needed. The result? When demand is seasonal or unpredictable the cloud truly does save money. But when demand is steady, or increases in demand are predictable, on-premises infrastructure costs less.
With the cloud, that is, fixed costs are small but incremental costs are big. The costs of on-premises systems are the opposite.
As if your CEO will have the patience to care. They’ll probably lack the patience to listen to your defensive explanations and will duck out of the room instead to re-watch Iron Man one more time.
About Author
