Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
The spate of layoffs in the tech industry continues apace, with companies like Google preparing for more layoffs in 2024. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities, is bullish about the industry’s fortunes.
IT Brew caught up with Ives after CES, an event Ives thought was the “most innovative and exciting CES since ’98,” to discuss the show and the prospects for the tech industry going forward.
“It’s the start of a new tech bull market,” Ives said. “And I think enterprise tech is going to dominate this next wave over the next two to three years.”
AI rumbling. But there are likely to be growing pains associated with any changes, as the industry saw when Google announced there are more layoffs coming in the new year. Though Google hasn’t explicitly tied the job cuts to AI, CEO Sundar Pichai euphemizing the cuts as “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas” indicates that the company is prioritizing investing in employees with skills in the technology, as Axios reported.
Rex Booth, CISO at SailPoint, told us at CES that he’s curious to see how the tech industry deploys AI in economies of scale. There are certain tasks that humans simply can’t do at the level of efficiency AI can provide, and how companies use the technology in a transparent and open way is, to Booth, more interesting than human-AI interactions.
“The application at the transparent business level is really interesting,” Booth said. “But it flies beneath the radar.”
Big dogs. Ives’s enthusiasm about tech is due in part to who—not just what—was on the floor at CES. Decision-makers Ives hadn’t seen in ten years were back for 2024, which was “extremely noteworthy,” he told us, in part due to the expanding role of AI in the development and rapid mainstreaming of innovative products in the robotics and electric vehicle markets.
He foresees a tech explosion where AI dominates the CES show floor for the next decade: The “AI tidal wave is about to hit the shores of tech.”
“The technology is more mainstream, from artificial intelligence to robotics to electric vehicles—it’s not a sci-fi experiment that’s never seen the light of day,” he said. “Generative AI technology, it’s changing tech, and I think you felt it in the vibe at CES this year.”