In Asia, the importance of inclusion in enhancing customer experience cannot be overstated. With its diverse population comprising various ethnicities, cultures, languages, and traditions, creating an inclusive environment is crucial for businesses to effectively cater to their customers' needs and preferences.  By embracing diversity and fostering inclusion, companies can better understand the unique perspectives and requirements of their customers, leading to more personalized and tailored...

KPMG asserts that with all the focus around modernization and/or transformation over the last few years, there is growing recognition that perhaps employees are feeling exhausted. They’re facing one modernizing initiative after another—or multiple initiatives simultaneously—often with competing timelines and priorities. This is known as digital transformation fatigue, and it’s a growing trend as companies grapple to keep pace with constant change. In this PodChats for FutureCIO, we are joined...

IDC predicts that in 2024, 50% of APAC cities and states will pilot GenAI to improve efficacy in community outreach and customer service, procurement, staff recruitment and training, and software development. The latest IDC FutureScape report predicts that AI and automation technologies will remain central to tech investment initiatives.  According to Dr Lily Phan, Research Director, Intelligent Automation at IDC Asia/Pacific AI is needed to lower operational costs, reduce staffing pressure,...

A GitHub report on the growth and impact of AI on software development, including claims pf a 55% faster coding when using an AI-assisted automation tool. GitClear published a separate report to determine how AI Assistants influence the quality of code being written. Just as important, as development teams start to include automation tools in the development cycle, how can they maintain control over the quality of the software, including keeping code secure. In this PodChats for FutureCIO, we...

Mordor Intelligence estimates the Asia-Pacific data centre market at around 14.27 thousand MW in 2024, predicting it to reach 23.20 thousand MW by 2029. JLL projects continued increase in rank density particularly among hyperscalers in response the growing demand for computational power.  With sustainability and climate change high on the agenda for many businesses, a multi-prong challenge of data centres is meeting customers’ net zero emissions goals, and their own targets. What can data...

126 business emails (per person) go out daily or 124.5 billion work emails get sent and received every day. The Email Statistics Report of Radicati Group claims that customers are most likely interested in interacting with a brand from the email notifications they receive from brands instead of using email as an interpersonal communication tool, showing value in emails outside of the usual open and reply rates. At 62.86%, email remains the preferred communication channel among businesses....

Artificial Intelligence continues to drive discussions across the enterprise. From the Board down to the workforce. C-suites are being asked to drive not just the discussion but strategies on how to best tap the technology before the competition does. Gartner warns that AI poses unique challenges for governance that must be directly addressed to mitigate risks and take advantage of opportunities. How are organizations developing AI governance frameworks, and what benefits and challenges...

It can be argued that business leaders and organisations face major shifts in the workplace, not the least of which are inflationary pressure on both employer and employee budgets, increased tension over return-to-office mandates, shifting legal and societal landscape concerning DEI initiatives, as well as the impact of client change. On the topic of sustainability, Gartner says in 2024 organizations will begin to highlight and promote direct climate change protections as a key part of their...

From the greek word authentikos, authentication, the act of verifying an identity, continues to evolved. Depending on the context, authentication might involve validating a person’s identity through identity documents, verifying the authenticity of a website with a digital certificate or determining the age of an artefact by carbon dating or ensuring a product is genuine. For decades passwords have been the most popular mode of authentication when accessing computing resources including...

The WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 reveals a divide between those who are resilient and those who aren’t. Emerging technologies will only widen this gap. Vivek Gullapalli, global CISO for APAC at Check Point Software Technologies opines that in the digital world, most “everything is highly interconnected, with the seemingly singular exception of cyber security, which remains locked in isolation, and bridging this gap will be critical to business success. In this PodChat for FutureCISO,...

A 2023 Deep Instinct report claims that the increased adoption of emerging technologies like generative AI is a cause for concern among cybersecurity professionals with 46% concerned that AI will increase their organisation’s vulnerability to attacks.  Stress levels are also increased among 55% of respondents to the study, with 86% of respondents who have experienced an increase in attacks over the past 12 months attributing the attacks to the use of generative AI. To help understand how...

Securing IoT in the enterprise is complex because of the varying of IoT devices and their diversity in form, function and purpose. While some IoT devices like smart devices may have some form of memory and computing, therefore operating system, others like sensors and telemetry modules merely capture data and pass this to other technologies in the workflow. It is this diversity of form, function and technology, and the proliferation of multiple standards or protocols that has limited the...

The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 paints a grim picture: there is a growing inequity between cyber-resilient organisations and those that are not. Among 120 executives attending the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting on cybersecurity, fewer than one in 10 respondents believe that in the next two years, generative AI will give an advantage to defenders over attackers. It doesn’t help that cyber-skills and talent shortages continue to widen, with 52% of public organisations citing this...

While the underrepresentation of women in cybersecurity is starting to improve – 20% in 2019 compared to 10% in 2013, that trend isn’t translating in the higher echelons of cybersecurity power. An Altrata report estimates that only 16% of CISOs are women. FutureCISO spoke to Rupal Hollenbeck, president of Check Point Software Technologies, on the long road for women in cybersecurity. 1. What is your view of women representation in the cybersecurity space? 2. Estimates put women professionals...

In 2023, the desire to benefit from tech-driven innovation got a boost in the arm, thanks to the perceived potential of emerging AI technologies. Arguably one of the most talked about tech in 2023 was artificial intelligence, specifically Generative AI. Forrester predicts that enterprise AI initiatives will boost productivity and creative problem-solving by 50% in 2024, and the benefits promised cut across all functions in the organisation, including operations, marketing and sales, customer...

Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for the Future of Digital Infrastructure — Agenda at IDC says the majority of organizations globally expect to rely on interconnected, hybrid, and multi-cloud strategies for digital infrastructure in the coming years. In Asia, we are already observing the hosting of business applications and data in the cloud becoming the norm for many organisations. As the trend continues, these same organisations will have to decide whether they can continue to...

In 2019, Singapore announced a national blueprint that would direct the use of AI to transform the economy.  The government reports that since then 150 teams have been working on research and development, and 900 startups are exploring new ideas with AI. In December 2023, the government followed it with version 2 with a central theme of “AI for the Public Good, for Singapore and the World.”  To help us understand what this means for businesses in Singapore, we are pleased to have with us Lian...

For decades custom applications were the norm. It allowed organisations to create applications that were designed to the very minute requirements of the business. Of course, the downside is that these applications require more time to build, most likely more expensive to maintain, have questionable transparency practices being applied, and someday run the risk of the original developers no longer being around to maintain them. With the growing popularity of citizen developers using low-code...

Fragmentation, uncertainty and volatility are constants. Anywhere you go in Asia (and the world) these are the same constraints that businesses and their leaders face in the race to remain of value to customers, partners, shareholders and employees. As we begin the new year, how will the constants of 2024 redefine the environment that CFOs, the finance team, and the rest of the organisation must swim in? We invited Adam Scriven, practice leader for finance consulting at KPMG to share with us...

Generative AI may have hijacked its top strategic predictions for 2024, but  Gartner says CEOs must empower a single responsible executive, such as the CISO, to tackle the challenge of misinformation across the organization. By 2027, 45% of CISOs’ remits will expand beyond cybersecurity, due to increasing regulatory pressure and attack surface expansion. Silvia Ihensekhien,  the director of information security and risk management at Swire Coca-Cola, discusses the strategic imperatives for...

In recent years, the role of chief financial officer (CFO) has never been more challenging as it is fulfilling for those who hold this position. From geopolitical uncertainties to changing market dynamics, from technological innovations that are paving the way for new business models, and from calamitous weather disturbances that are reminding business leaders about the importance of addressing climate change today for a sustainable future tomorrow, the CFO has an important seat in directing...

There are many words to describe the economic environment of 2023 and dull is definitely not one of them.  2023 remains a particularly challenging period for many CFOs who must grapple with two local wars, one in Eastern Europe and the other in the Middle East, and their impact on supply chains, escalating cyberattacks, rigid labour markets, efforts to adopt sustained ESG strategies in response to climate change, and the business impact of adopting or not adopting fast enough emerging...

In a joint Harvard Business Review and Google Cloud report 97% of business leaders surveyed believe that democratising access to data and analytics across their organization is important to business success. The same study revealed that only 60% of these leaders believe their organization is very effective at giving employees access to data and analytics tools. With business leaders now seeing greater autonomy in deciding their technology directions, this may have led to the rising adoption...

Gartner’s VP analyst, Bart Willemsen says technology disruptions and socioeconomic uncertainties require a willingness to act boldly and strategically enhance resilience over ad hoc responses. He posits that “IT leaders are in a unique position to strategically lay down a roadmap where technology investments help their business's sustenance of success amidst these uncertainties and pressures.” Interestingly, five of Gartner’s top 10 strategic predictions for 2024 have an AI influence on...