Final week, Forrester hosted our Predictions 2025 Webinar: Expertise & Safety. We had a good time bantering about a few of the most impactful safety and know-how predictions that our analyst groups known as out, together with across the ROI for AI initiatives, non-public cloud and VMware, plans for agentic AI, and implementing the EU AI Act in 2025. Because of the webinar attendees who requested some insightful questions all through the session! Sadly, we ran out of time and couldn’t reply your whole questions, however listed below are responses to a few of the questions we couldn’t get to (questions have been edited for readability):
- Which utility sorts shall be finest fitted to on-prem clouds? Personal cloud can’t remotely match the firepower, scale, and tempo of innovation of the hyperscale public cloud platforms, however this doesn’t imply that personal cloud is irrelevant. In actual fact, non-public cloud would be the most cost-effective selection for a lot of enterprise IT, notably in outlets that embrace the enabling model of high-performance IT that focuses on stabilizing and defending operations which can be cost-effective and don’t require huge cloud sources. Then there are workloads the place safety and sovereignty are paramount and the place the autonomy of enterprise IT is crucial. Even IT organizations embracing the remodeling model of high-performance IT might discover that private-cloud-based AI meets their wants, particularly if DeepSeek’s claims of AI innovation on garden-variety GPUs turn out to be generalized.
- Do you counsel a method or standards to assist stakeholders choose high-value enterprise use instances for AI? There isn’t a method, per se. A great way of interested by it’s within the type of a portfolio of use instances and capabilities which can be road-mapped with interconnected milestones — a few of which ship fast worth and others extra so over the long term (as a result of for some use instances, even high-value ones, it could be higher to attend or go sluggish). Use case choice is sophisticated for AI and never simply pushed by financial worth however entails readiness based mostly on 4 groups: enterprise, information, know-how, and governance.
- Have you ever noticed any recurrent habits in how and who’s writing the AI agenda? Any rising sample (e.g., centralization, federation) because the follow evolves in every group? In Forrester’s State Of Knowledge, Analytics, Measurement, And Insights Survey, 2024, we requested information and analytics decision-makers, “The place does essentially the most senior information and analytics chief report back to in your group?” Thirty-nine p.c of respondents say IT and 37% say to the CEO — so the agenda is ready by IT leaders or the CEO, as mentioned within the webinar. We’re seeing loads of partnership between enterprise and IT and federation.
- Considering extra about safety than AI, I see AI as creating a good greater precedence to cowl the fundamentals to scale back publicity and threat. Do you agree? We lined this briefly on the finish of the webinar, but it surely deserves an extended response. As we construct AI into our methods and functions, loads of the dangers and challenges ought to look acquainted: unprotected API calls into third-party fashions, unvetted fashions, and shadow AI. Over time, we’ve realized classes about third-party threat administration, utilizing open-source and third-party software program elements safely, and managing and defending APIs — we have to apply these classes to AI in order that historical past doesn’t repeat itself but once more.
- How nicely are third-party threat administration methods factoring dangers round AI governance? Most of the platforms that assist third-party threat administration (TPRM) additionally allow governance, threat, and compliance (GRC) use instances. These platforms assist AI governance by serving to organizations get a deal with on the vary of AI use instances that their firms deploy and the number of fashions that assist them — stock belongings, methods, and third-party entities, in addition to assist AI coverage creation, distribution, and monitoring. Generative AI options of GRC and TPRM platforms have rapidly turn out to be commonplace to how threat professionals handle the dangers of AI of their organizations. Moreover, AI governance platforms are rising as a new market forecasted to develop at a 30% compound annual development charge to the top of this decade. There’s extra to come back on this, with Forrester planning new, groundbreaking evaluative analysis on AI governance platforms in 2025.
Thanks once more to all of the attendees who requested such insightful questions! For those who missed the webinar, you’ll be able to nonetheless take a look at the replay right here. Forrester shoppers, make sure to take a look at all of our 2025 Predictions studies and arrange an inquiry or steering session if you wish to dive in additional.
