Dynatrace: Keeping an eye on responsible and secure artificial intelligence in 2024
The founder and CTO of Dynatrace, Bernd Greifeneder, talks about AI for 2024. He says that companies will have to find a balance between the benefits and risks of new AI technologies. With nearly three-quarters of businesses planning to use generative AI, these new technologies are expected to act as a “copilot” for digital transformation. With business software-based revenues expected to quadruple by 2030, Greifeneder suggests that businesses should prepare for the potential positives and risks of AI in the coming years.
Autonomous Agent-Generated Code Risks and Digital Immune Systems
In 2024, more organizations are expected to experience major digital service outages due to poor quality and insufficiently supervised software code. Developers are increasingly using generative AI-powered autonomous agents to write code, exposing their organizations to increased risks of unexpected problems affecting customer and user experiences. The challenge of maintaining autonomous agent-generated code is similar to preserving code created by developers who have left an organization.
To address these challenges, organizations will develop digital immune systems, combining practices and technologies for software design, development, operations, and analytics to ensure code resilience by default. Predictive AI will be harnessed to automatically forecast problems in code or applications before they emerge, triggering an instant, automated response to safeguard the user experience. In an evolving digital landscape and era of cybersecurity threats, businesses face a wide range of challenges, including protecting sensitive data and safeguarding against cyberattacks. As AI becomes more integrated into business operations, risk training for employees will become even more important in 2024.
Strategic AI Leadership
Greifeneder suggests that organizations should appoint a Chief AI Officer (CAIO) to oversee the safe and responsible development and deployment of AI. Senior executives should ensure enterprises are prepared for AI, similar to having a security executive (CISO) on their leadership teams. The CAIO will focus on developing policies and educating the workforce to use AI safely to protect the organization from accidental noncompliance, intellectual property leakage, or security threats. As AI becomes a commodity, it will become a preferred approach to data-backed insights and automation. Dynatrace predicts that organizations will move toward a composite AI approach, combining generative AI with other types of AI and additional data sources, in 2024. This approach will enable more advanced reasoning and bring precision, context, and meaning to the outputs produced by generative AI.
