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Tech Talk: Top Five Tech Trends for 2H24

Technology continues to evolve and is becoming even more of a driver of business than in the past. We highlight five technology trends we believe will continue to have an impact in 2H24. AI Is Continuing to Grab Investor Interest as Expectations Have It Affecting Nearly Everything Artificial intelligence (AI). AI is already having a major impact on the tech sector, and this is only going to accelerate in 2024. With an estimated market size of $137 billion in 2022, AI is projected to grow significantly to $1.8 trillion by 2030, a CAGR of 38%. We can expect to see more sophisticated AI applications and algorithms that can perform complex tasks and make decisions with human-like accuracy. AI is also likely to play a key role in robotic technologies. See our report on AI and all of its subsectors here. Semiconductor company NVIDIA (NVDA) is the star stock here, up more than 200% in the last year. Generative AI is the hottest subsector. What seems to have caught people by surprise is how well it works. Generative AI is used for a diverse set of tasks, from understanding proteins, to writing code, to cleaning up employee reviews, to making sure they are socially and politically correct, to improving human language translations. OpenAI is the best-known company in the space. Estimates for the generative AI market size vary, but the latest estimates have it at $95 billion by 2030. Cybersecurity Is Growing Ransomware is putting cybersecurity back on the front pages. US car dealerships and even the US Federal Reserve have recently been hit with ransomware attacks. Software company CDK Global, which provides systems for 15,000 North American car dealerships, was taken down by an attack in June. A couple of months before that, UnitedHealthcare was attacked, and in late June, the US Federal Reserve was reportedly hit. Each of these were reported on by the mainstream media, from CBS to PBS—these just raise the profile of cybersecurity companies. The major cybersecurity types include data breaches, malware, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks. The US government found that a plurality of reported incidents was other/unknown (46%), which is not a confidence-inducing number. The second-highest category was improper usage (31%), followed by phishing (9%). The global cybersecurity market was valued at $105 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $266 billion by 2027, a CAGR of 8.9%. See our report on cybersecurity here. Cybersecurity is provided by a variety of companies from multi-billion-dollar companies like Cisco Systems (CSCO) and IBM (IBM) to microcap companies like SideChannel (SDCH). Other vendors include Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Broadcom (AVGO), Check Point Software (CHKP), Intel (INTC), Trend Micro (TMICY), Zscaler (ZS), and CrowdStrike (CRWD)... continued in our full report.