Tech themes that will rule CIO agendas in 2023

2022 has been a rollercoaster. I don’t think any of us could have predicted what was coming. The constant through it all has been the importance of technology to overcome our near-term obstacles and to realize our long-term opportunities.

The technological innovation that drives human progress is accelerating. At the forefront of this advancement and growth, we will experience new expectations. We will expect technology to help us advance in areas from education to healthcare to government services and beyond.

As we look ahead to 2023, I see four themes rising to top of the CIO agenda.

Technology will define the work experience

In the do-anything-from-anywhere economy, the future of work is evolving, and as we design for a hybrid world, technology rather than physical workspace, will increasingly define the employee experience. 

Version one of work-from-anywhere during the early stages of the COVID was about the “anywhere” part. The next phase of this journey is about making the “work” part better. We need the right tools and devices, the right workspaces for collaboration, and the right culture to make work, well, work.

We now realize, having the right client capability, form factor and most importantly ecosystem of peripherals creates the complete environment needed to excel. After all, from building culture to driving innovation to serving customers, technology is the fulcrum of progress. 

Walled gardens will crumble into tech ecosystem

The global technology industry is massive and growing every day. The good news is that there is no shortage of innovation to address the breadth of business opportunities. 

In the early days of cloud, most companies ended up adopting multiple public, private, edge and even telecom clouds to power their business. This “multiple cloud” stage creates huge access to innovation.

In 2022, we started to see an industry shift to true “multicloud” architectures. In 2023, we expect accelerating innovation to focus on making the entire technology ecosystem work as a platform for your digital transformation. We also expect organizations to lean into technology that gives them flexibility and open access to innovation, and to partners who can coordinate the sprawl into an automated working system.

And there’s good reason – no single solution, platform or provider will deliver on the full promise of technology. That means that the proverbial “walled gardens” of “closed” ecosystems will crumble.

AI will reach an inflection point

We’ve been talking about the promise of AI for years. 2023 is a year that we expect acceleration of real-world use of AI and machine learning. At Dell, we have been on this journey and today have around 1000 projects, products, or efforts focused on using AI to advance our business. That means, we also need more infrastructure optimized for these highly demanding workloads. 

In 2023, there will be an even broader range of acceleration chips entering the market and a correlating increase in performance and efficiency. Organizations that ride the second wave of AI will see a distinct competitive advantage. As the industry matures, AI will also become more democratized as open-source AI becomes prevalent and accessible to larger communities.

Momentum will accelerate for Zero Trust architectures

The digital transformation of the global economy is increasing the number of potential attack surfaces. With organizations transforming their security strategies, many are looking at Zero Trust architectures to better secure their environments. The three main tenets are: universal continuous authentication of everything; robust authoritative policy driven behavior; and deeply integrated threat management.

The real challenge is the current state of the industry and technology makes integration of Zero Trust too complex for most customers. Our job is to ease that burden and simplify the process. Ultimately, Zero Trust will become the foundation for a new level of data-security and trust in a highly distributed multi-cloud world where everything is connected.

This shortlist is at the top of my mind for the next year, but if there’s one thing 2022 taught us, it’s how hard it is to predict the future. No doubt, 2023 will be full of unknowns and surprises. But I am confident that innovation will drive amazing progress. And I’m excited for what lies ahead.

Jeff Clarke

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Jeff Clarke is the Vice Chairman and Co-COO of Dell Technologies.