Indian CXOs not fully ready to respond to tech, business changes in 2024: Report

While the last one year witnessed a seismic shift in industry landscapes driven by ground-breaking technological advancements and turbulent business landscape, CXOs in India foresee an even faster rate of change in 2024, according to a new report published on Monday.

According to Accenture’s pulse of change: 2024 index, published ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, 89% of leaders in India anticipate an even faster rate of change this year. While nearly two-thirds (63%) see this change as an opportunity to grow their revenue. Despite their optimism, nearly half (48%) of C-suite leaders in India said that they are not fully prepared to respond to the change they will face in the recent technology or business environment.

However, 42% of business leaders globally said that skills shortage is one of the top three challenges that would hold back their organizations’ ability to respond to change, underscoring the importance for businesses of making their talent strategy a priority—especially as they work to tap the potential of new technologies.

The Index ranks six factors of change affecting businesses that are technology, talent, economic, geopolitical, climate and consumer and social—using a range of key business indicators, such as labour productivity and IT spending and found that across all six factors, the rate of change has risen sharply since 2019—183 per cent over the past four years and 33% in the past year alone.

Sandeep Dutta, Senior Managing Director and Lead- India Business, Accenture said, “Rapid pace of change has not only become a reality today but is also recognised as an opportunity for growth by business leaders. To stay resilient, businesses in India need to embrace a bold vision and a comprehensive strategy of continuous reinvention, powered by cloud, data and AI, along with new ways of working."

Dutta added that transforming every part of the organisation can help businesses stay agile and achieve new performance frontiers while taking advantage of disruptive technologies such as generative AI.

Meanwhile, 58% of C-suite leaders in India expect the pace of technology disruption to accelerate even further in 2024. Notably, about 88% see generative artificial intelligence (AI) as more of an opportunity than a threat, while 74% view it as more beneficial to revenue growth than cost reduction.

However, globally nearly half (47 per cent) said that they are not fully prepared for the accelerating rate of technology change and 72 per cent are now approaching investments with more caution because of societal concerns about the responsible use of AI.

Speaking at Fortune‘s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco last week, Paul Daugherty, the CTO of Accenture said he believes it’s critical for businesses to focus on helping their employees adapt to the changes that artificial intelligence will bring to the workplace.

He added that, effective use of AI technology calls for smart prompts and keeping humans involved in the AI process. Prompt engineering, how people talk to the AI, and having humans in the loop, adds a bit of human wisdom to handle the technology.

To be sure, a report published last week by security firm Dynatrace noted that 83% of CIO/CTOs believe that while AI has become mandatory, there are also challenges and risks that organizations need to manage, from ensuring the outputs of generative AI are trustworthy to support business-critical use cases to maintaining compliance with internal policies and global regulations related to data security and privacy. These findings underscore the need for a composite approach to AI, whereby organizations combine multiple types of AI—such as generative, predictive, and causal—and different data sources—such as observability, security, and business events. This approach brings precision, context, and meaning to AI outputs.