What's ahead in 2024? Stale cookies get the boot, scaling customer data operations, and unleashing AI

As we enter 2024, IT professionals find themselves at a pivotal moment, grappling with a trio of formidable challenges: the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), the phasing out of traditional cookies, and ongoing staffing shortages.

These developments are not merely altering the IT landscape but are also necessitating a reevaluation of strategies across businesses. In response to this dynamic environment, IT teams must pivot towards adopting scalable, AI-integrated customer data management systems.

Ensuring data accuracy, accessibility, and compliance is essential. This strategy will not only enable businesses to effectively navigate the immediate challenges but also position them for future innovation and growth. This article delves into the anticipated trends and changes of 2024, offering insights into proactive strategies for IT teams to stay ahead in this evolving landscape.

Cookies are Dead. And so is Your Third-Party Data Strategy

Despite growing anxiety about Google's fluctuating plans to phase out third-party cookies, the company has set a definitive timeline. They intend to discontinue them for 1 percent of Chrome users in the first quarter of 2024, with a complete phase-out anticipated in the latter half of the year.

This elimination marks a significant shift, requiring customer-centric teams to seek IT support for alternative first-party data collection and management methods. Fortunately, there are some excellent solutions to aid in this process.

Customer data platforms (CDPs), for example, are key in managing and analyzing this data. They serve as central hubs for data collection and organization. And through them, IT can extract valuable customer behavior, preference, and engagement insights, helping brands customize campaigns and enhance customer experiences.

Scaling Customer Data Operations

Customer data’s complexity increases due to its diverse sources and formats, compounded by rapid collection speeds. The human factor also adds complexity, with people changing last names or entering false information on websites, apps and other places where companies collect it. Effectively resolving customer identities requires sophisticated solutions.

Without proper strategies and tools, "dirty" or inaccurate data emerges, leading to poor insights and flawed marketing campaigns, causing inefficiency and financial loss.

Tools for a robust, adaptable, and scalable system are key for IT’s role in business success. For example, cloud-based solutions excel in scaling with data volume and adapting to structural changes.

Implementing solid data systems that combine various sources with cloud solutions is vital. These systems need to efficiently collect customer data and independently adjust to structure changes, thus minimizing errors.

Developing a flexible system is critical for business prosperity beyond 2024. With leading companies enhancing their strategies, IT teams must urgently refine their approaches to stay competitive.

Harnessing AI Amid Staffing Shortages

AI, especially in the context of IT labor shortages, presents immense potential. With scarce technical resources, companies should use AI for effective process completion. This might include automated customer service chatbots, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and personalized marketing strategies.

However, in almost all cases, the better the data quality, the more effectively AI can analyze, learn and provide valuable insights or actions, thereby enhancing process efficiency and decision-making.

Data also serves as a pivotal element in the art of prompt engineering. This process, integral to harnessing AI's full potential, involves meticulously crafting and refining inputs to steer AI models towards generating specific outputs or content styles.

The insights gleaned from the AI model's training data are invaluable, providing a roadmap for creating more effective prompts. Moreover, the iterative feedback loop, where data from the AI's responses are analyzed and used to fine-tune future prompts, is essential.

This not only enhances the model's accuracy but also allows for the customization of prompts to suit unique use cases or target audiences. Thus, in the synergy between data and prompt engineering lies the key to unlocking AI's most powerful and relevant applications.

As the year progresses, the synergy of sophisticated data handling and AI will be crucial for IT's role in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

Photo Credit: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock

Derek Slager co-founded Amperity to create a tool that would give marketers and analysts access to accurate, consistent and comprehensive customer data. As CTO, he leads the company’s product, engineering, operations and information security teams to deliver on Amperity’s mission of helping people use data to serve customers. Prior to Amperity, Derek was on the founding team at Appature and held engineering leadership positions at various business and consumer-facing startups, focusing on large-scale distributed systems and security.