Despite some notable moments, 2024 was a bit of a bumpy ride when it came to technology. Concerns about AI created a hive of regulatory activity. Big outages stranded fliers and shoppers alike. Investments in tech trends cooled amidst inflationary pressures, and high hopes for generative AI (gen AI) hit some turbulence due to frustrations over the technology's complexities and the organizational challenges of using it. While 'uncertainty' is likely to remain a watchword for 2025, significant geopolitical and economic shifts as well as the relentless pace of technology (driven by 'space-race' levels of investment in AI) suggest a year of significant changes. Some of our leaders have put together a collection of musings, observations, and considerations to help tech leaders (and leaders who are thoughtful about tech) think through important technology priorities. Tech leadership: Questions to answer in 2025 Tech talent: Putting the 'human' back in 'human-centered AI' How we work: The gen AI agents are coming Tech resiliency: Make the business'not just IT'resilient Gen AI: Time for an honest assessment Tech productivity: Less promise, more performance Lessons from Asia: Rewire for AI ERP transformation: Two decisions that can cut costs by 30 percent...

Volta, a new startup with a team split between two headquarters in Milan and Paris, has secured a '6 million pre-seed round ($6.3 million) to develop a new vertical software-as-a-service platform focused on B2B sales. In more practical terms, the Volta team pitches its product as an equivalent to Shopify but focused on B2B transactions. While Shopify, the ecommerce giant that helps people create an online store and easily sell items to consumers, offers a B2B commerce platform, Volta thinks there's value in creating a company specifically focused on the B2B transactions. When they go to trade shows and meet potential clients in their offices, these companies tend to juggle between several versions of their paper catalogs. Depending on the client and the context, they don't want to show the same list of items and prices. That's why Volta wants to simplify the catalog management process. However, the company doesn't want to replace the good old enterprise resource planning system. When a purchase order is signed, the transaction is then processed through the ERP....

Akira Bell is senior vice president and CIO at Mathematica, a research and data analytics consultancy. Bell was a finalist for this year's MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award in recognition of her work at Mathematica to spearhead the launch of the data collaboration platform Mquiry, a turnkey system for onboarding and working with clients' data securely. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Bell to understand her role and how leaders should be thinking about their data. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Akira Bell: Mathematica is a company of subject matter experts ' social scientists, data scientists, economists ' and technologists who have a deep understanding of policies, practices, and data that impact public well-being around the world. Because of this, we're able to help our clients reimagine how they collect, analyze, and apply data to solve today's urgent social challenges. My role at Mathematica spans what we consider the traditional CIO role, in that it has all of the internal responsibilities for infrastructure, security, network, communications, enterprise resource planning, policy, and so on. But we also have some of the backbone for the client-facing teams, where technologists from my team sit in with the business units and they work in concert. Our platforms for hosting client data and solutions are managed by our team as well....

Few businesses have implemented strategies to build an age-inclusive, multigenerational workforce. Even fewer seem to be aware of the important role that workplace technologies can play in driving the performance outcomes for workers of different ages. But as labor force demographics skew older as more people work longer, business success and productivity will be increasingly tied to the well-being and job performance of workers ages 60 and older, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.1 As business technologies become increasingly complex, older workers experience a varying degree of increasing difficulty using them to perform job tasks.2 Indeed, effectively using tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications requires many cognitive resources that are less available for older workers because of age-related cognitive changes. Using a laboratory experiment and two large-scale surveys, I found that the job performance of older workers is hindered by the reduced perceptual speed and the technology overload that can occur if they are overburdened with an excessive number of technology demands.3 This problem is increasingly common because the pressure to keep up with ever-evolving office technologies compounds the pressure to keep up with other ongoing job responsibilities....