The AI knowledge gap is expected to determine a company's productivity and profitability.

Cloudflare, the leading connectivity cloud company, has released its 2024 trend predictions for CIOs, CSOs, and IT executives worldwide.

According to this outlook, Cloudflare said that the 'AI knowledge gap' will determine the productivity and profitability of companies, and 'resilience' will be the biggest concern for companies as cyberattacks evolve and intensify day by day.

John Engates, CTO of Cloudflare Field, says today’s AI gap is being exacerbated by the actions of top executives who decide to invest in AI or ignore it.

“AI-savvy teams are seeing a surge in productivity thanks to AI tools that create efficiencies, while those without are left struggling to maintain the status quo,” he said. “Across industries, this gap will serve as a catalyst to further solidify the leaders and brands that will navigate the economic storm and emerge on top now and in the years to come.”

“IT teams are under pressure from shrinking budgets and increasingly complex cloud environments, and IT practitioners can no longer ignore skyrocketing cloud costs while being tasked with consolidating vendors wherever possible,” said John Engatesfield, CTO. “A platform that facilitates connectivity and visibility in the midst of the cloud chaos is a key enabler for competitive advantage.”“Clouds that lock data into their platforms are unlikely to survive,” he predicted.

Rebecca Weekly, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Cloudflare, predicts that as AI continues to proliferate, supply chain challenges will become insurmountable, and will likely be more severe than the global supply chain crisis caused by the pandemic in 2021. He diagnosed that enterprises will have no choice but to rely on software optimization that focuses on learning more task-specific models from base models to reduce the required computing space and achieve more solutions with less computing space.

Vice President Rebecca also said that in 2023, sustainability efforts will slow down significantly due to the AI craze, and this trend is expected to continue in the next year.

“With the surge in demand for computing and AI, global conflicts in areas that supply oil and gas, and unexpected weather events, electricity prices will continue to rise, and we will need a concerted effort from individuals and businesses alike to conserve power for other users in our data center regions and refocus on sustainability to ensure we can scale efficiently in the coming years,” he said.

Grant Bourzikas, CSO at Cloudflare, said resilience will be the biggest concern and interest for enterprises in 2024.

“As more zero-day attacks, flaws in popular software, supply chain issues, and threat actor tactics evolve and become more realistic, organizations must remain vigilant about what steps they can take to stay secure,” he said. “Responsible disclosure will continue to be a critical pillar of resilience regardless of the priorities or style of the CISO. Managing attacks like zero-days is not as simple as thinking, ‘Patch it and you’re done.’”

“In 2024, security leaders will undergo a mindset shift to transform incident management, patching, and the evolution of security protections into regular, continuous processes. Mitigations such as patches for each variant of the vulnerability can reduce the immediate risk, but they do not completely eliminate the elements,” he emphasized.