Navigating top macrotrends in the age of AI: What can we learn from digital leaders?

Times of great change provide great opportunity, and those best equipped to navigate uncertainty have the advantage. More than ever, what’s critical to developing and keeping that advantage is access to the insights needed to make ROI-led decisions.

This year, CGI’s leaders held in-depth interviews with 1,800 business and IT executives across the industries we serve to understand their top trends and their resulting priorities and investments. Our Voice of Our Clients research is part of our annual strategic planning process. In addition to informing our own planning, we share the aggregated insights with clients for benchmarking purposes and to benefit their strategies and plans.

Digital acceleration continues as the top macrotrend, amplified by AI

Our findings this year reveal that digital acceleration continues to be the most impactful macrotrend for executives, with 73% citing high impacts for their organization—and CEOs rating the impacts the highest. Rising interest in AI, spurred by generative AI (GenAI), amplifies the impacts of digitization across all aspects of society. It also contributes to the need for greater cyber resilience to protect everything from company reputation and customer data to critical infrastructure.

The macrotrends of changing social demographics and the fight against climate change were cited as having high impact by 52% and 50% of executives, respectively, followed by supply chain reconfiguration (33%) and the shift in world economic order (28%).

Notably this year, we see a big jump in U.S. executives citing high impacts of the fight against climate change (up 14 percentage points year over year). Sustainability also topped industry-level trends overall, particularly in energy, manufacturing, and transportation. We also see huge implications for industries like insurance where pricing and coverage of climate-related risks grow increasingly problematic.

New dual agenda seeks to balance growth and cost management

A key change we see this year is a shift in business priorities to drive growth and innovation, in balance with cost control and efficiency gains. This requires constantly evaluating how to invest in new technologies including AI. The goal is to spend smartly while keeping IT operating costs down. Ideally, new investments can be funded by savings from more efficient IT operations achieved through modernization. This dual focus agenda is not new to most business leaders, but GenAI has accelerated its importance.

Tight alignment between IT and business drives better outcomes

We also know that when IT and business leaders are closely aligned, organizations realize better return on their digital investments. Historically, our research showed IT and business leaders often had different priorities (for example, IT leaders prioritizing cybersecurity higher than their business counterparts). This year, however, more than 90% of executives cite medium-to-high alignment between business and IT to support strategy. This is the highest level we’ve seen since we started conducting this research more than a decade ago. We believe this reflects a new shared agenda between these teams, driven by a combination of business efficiency focus and the promise of digital technologies, including AI and cloud.

GenAI exploration is ubiquitous

Our research shows that GenAI is in its early and experimental stages, but is ubiquitous, with nearly 80% of executives citing active exploration of this technology, such as to generate new content based on trained data. At the same time, the number of executives citing explorations of traditional AI is up 14 percentage points and those citing implementations in progress or done (e.g., full speech and image processing and conversational AI) is up 10 percentage points.

The data suggests that GenAI may have increased the appetite for traditional AI investments. Executives shared a wide range of GenAI use cases, from software development and core processes to R&D, customer service, finance and the supply chain. In health and life sciences, for example, GenAI is helping humans analyze massive datasets, faster and more accurately, for drug discovery, precision diagnoses, and other complex tasks.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, and AI is no exception

With GenAI, we are witnessing possibly the most game-changing technological innovation since the Internet. Every industry is undergoing its own evolution as well. Electrification and the energy transition. New laws and regulations. Escalating customer demands. Increasingly complex supply chains.

And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same. What was once safe and predictable (incumbency, longevity, or market share) is no longer. But knowing we’ve faced big technology changes before should bring comfort that leaders can navigate these waters with an ROI-led approach.

While GenAI may be getting massive hype around its society-altering possibilities, our research shows that top C-level concerns remain focused on managing costs to fund smart investments, along with continued IT modernization to increase agility and efficiency to meet customer and citizen needs.

If we zoom out from AI, digital transformation has been a top business priority for years. This year, 72% of executives say digitization has a high impact on their business models. And while 93% say their organizations have a digital strategy in place, only 34% say they are seeing the expected results from those strategies.

When comparing industries, more banking leaders cite achieving digital strategy results, likely spurred by their highly digitized core business. From omni-channel service delivery to AI-driven fraud detection, to real-time payments, digitization has revolutionized how banking is done, enhancing the customer experience, driving operational excellence, and increasing revenue growth.

So, what’s getting in the way?

Asked to share the top challenges to achieving business priorities, executives cited budget constraints, scarcity of talent and specialized skills, optimizing investments and operations, and improving organizational culture and alignment. In terms of digital strategy implementation, 80% said legacy systems pose a medium-to-high degree of challenge.

Digital leaders are pulling further ahead in achieving outcomes from digitization

We define digital leaders as those producing expected results from their digital strategies. This year, we see digital leaders widening the gap in achieving desired outcomes compared to others. This edge enables them to accelerate investments to drive revenue growth and improve efficiency because they are more successful in:

• Pursuing holistic digital and data strategies (including data protection strategies) that include their ecosystems
• Modernizing systems and applications
• Driving business model agility through greater reliance on managed services
• Implementing advanced technologies, including AI

What can we learn from digital leaders?

Inspired by digital leaders, and our experience in collaboration with clients, we recommend the following actions to accelerate future success in pursuing a dual-focus agenda of growth and efficiency:

• Use the momentum of GenAI to get your arms around your AI and data strategy. This includes your data foundation, data literacy and innovation culture, as well as putting in place frameworks for the responsible use of AI. Whether improving existing processes or using AI in novel ways, these are critical prerequisites.
• Extend your digital and data strategies to your ecosystem of suppliers and partners.
• Explore cost-effective ways to accelerate IT modernization to drive agility, such as through managed services, cloud and AI.
• Emphasize an ROI-led approach for pursuing advanced technologies, including using AI to solve business problems.
• Build in (vs. bolt on) data protection, data privacy, ESG and responsible use of technology principles from the start.
• Invest in talent to ensure both technology and business understanding. Technical savvy must be combined with core industry knowledge of your organization, including your supply chain ecosystem.

As executives continue to explore how to further spur growth, innovation and efficiency, CGI can provide the actionable insights, domain expertise and end-to-end capabilities that are vital to supporting ROI-led decisions. Learn more about our Voice of Our Clients research, and reach out to discuss how we can assist your organization in accelerating outcomes.