The 7 Biggest Enterprise Mobility Trends For 2024

The 2020s has, in just three years, seen one of the biggest leaps forward in enterprise mobility since the development of the mobile telephone and the portable computer in the early 1980s, one with the capacity to create a huge leap forward for businesses.

This collection of trends and innovations, often loosely connected under the banner of Industry 4.0, has developed exponentially since the fundamental changes in how many people worked began in 2020 after a decade of slow progression and development of critical enterprise infrastructure.

The year 2024 is set to be another leap forward towards a revolution in how businesses function, and seven big industry trends to look out for next year are a keen indication of why this will be the case.

The 5G Connectivity Rollout

Roughly every decade since 1979, there has been a revolution in wireless communications technologies, and throughout the early 2020s, we have seen the gradual rollout of the next generation of mobile communications in the form of 5G.

Each generation has brought with it fundamental changes in how we do business. 1G made out-of-office business decisions possible, 2G allowed for text messaging, 3G for internet-based business communications and early smart capabilities, and 4G sowed the seeds for cloud technology.

The 5G revolution is at the core of what makes Industry 4.0 possible because it is the first generation of mobile carriers where the capacity exceeds not only existing mobile internet infrastructure but is also competitive with cable internet.

The implications of this change are enormous, and indeed, many of the other trends on this list are only possible as a result of 5G’s enhanced capabilities.

It means that huge amounts of data and a tremendous number of users can access the same networks, allowing for reliable machine-to-machine data transfer wirelessly as well as the reliable integration of smart devices in fields where errors must be kept to a minimum.

The 5G technology itself is not completely new; smartphones with 5G capabilities have existed since 2019. However, now that the technology has matured and the network has been rolled out to the point that much larger parts of the population and the globe have it, it is far more likely to be adopted by businesses.

Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Integration

If there was a single technology story that dominated 2023 above any other, it was the development and discussion surrounding Artificial Intelligence, most famously in the form of large language models produced by companies such as OpenAI.

The use of AI in business is obviously nothing new; Deep Blue was allegedly developed as a promotional tool for IBM as early as the 1990s.

In terms of widely used machine learning systems, BakeryScan was developed in the late 2000s as an accurate way of selling bread, cakes, and other baked goods that did not have barcodes. It was later adapted to detect cancer cells.

However, 2023 was a huge breakout year for AI outside of a few niche medical research use cases, and systems such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, and DALL-E all became worldwide fascinations for consumers and potential business opportunities for companies.

There was a very diverse mix of reactions to the development of AI tools in 2023, in no small part due to the difficulties businesses that would potentially find benefits in advancements in machine learning and AI models had discerning signal from noise.

Depending on which futurist, business leader, or technology guru entered the discourse, AI was either a sign that the future of the world as we know it had arrived, a glorified plagiarism tool that could only piece existing data together without any extra creativity, or the potential end of mankind itself.

None of these stances are especially useful for any company that wishes to take itself seriously, particularly in the shadow of the crash of cryptocurrency and NFTs, both built on blockchain technology that had similar world-changing claims before the value dropped significantly.

The truth, as has started to emerge in the latter part of 2023 and is likely to be the case in 2024, is that AI is still a developing technology that is most likely to be used at this point for completing simple repetitive tasks without the need for complex automation programming.

In this form, machine learning will be used not as a replacement for human workers but as a supplementary tool that makes certain complex and arduous tasks much easier and much quicker.

This is already being explored in the medical industry, where trained AI models have been developed that can not only spot certain subtle biomarkers that specialists can miss but also investigate medical imagery at a much faster rate than humans.

Exactly where AI will go in 2024 is still up for debate, but the most likely option is that the most optimistic and most pessimistic views are likely to be incorrect, but AI will be used in more realistic, less creative, and lower-scale use cases.

Enhanced Security Measures

Enterprise security will always be an evergreen trend for businesses. Given that they have so much to lose from a security breach not only in terms of data and actual potential losses but also reputational damage, companies will do their utmost to protect their data as much as possible.

The early 2020s so far have seen countless attempted security breaches of both small and large organizations alike, to the point that ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) was the second most common type of digital security attack in 2022, according to an IBM intelligence study.

The reason for this is partially that wider services where data is accessed through a wide variety of different channels need a full-service all-channels approach to data security, which also includes improved awareness from users of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on the types of correspondence to avoid.

Mobile App Ecosystem Expansion

With increased capacity and interconnectedness comes a greater expansion of the mobile app ecosystem, a trend that started in the 2010s but has exploded wildly in the 2020s.

Most businesses at pretty much any scale are reliant on a range of applications and platforms, many of which are either bespoke or white-label tools that are increasingly designed with a cross-platform approach in mind.

As a growing number of business users work less on conventional computers and laptops and increasingly on versatile tablets and even larger phones such as folding devices, the need for a versatile, cross-platform mobile app ecosystem will only expand.

Exactly what form that will take is uncertain. Many companies have attempted to create so-called “super apps” that attempt to bring together as many different solutions as possible, but in practice, very few of these have thus far found success outside of China.

That has the potential to change if the convenience of an application suite and the all-in-one access it provides offsets the larger download size, data costs, and inconvenience compared to the current a la carte style of app development.

Internet Of Things Integration

Similar to the timeline of excitement surrounding AI, the development towards the Industry 4.0 smart factory has been relatively steady.

However, with 5G and the promise it provides for interconnectivity, the concept of a truly intelligent factory floor or industrial facility where productivity, throughput, reliability, capacity, and essentially anything that could possibly be measured could be checked and fed into an easy-to-use monitoring and reporting interface.

Alongside the wider app interface, this could mean that anyone in the company infrastructure could access specific real-time analytics information and factor that into presentations, reports, and business decisions.

Added IoT integration could potentially lead to less disruption of manufacturing and industrial equipment, as maintenance could be scheduled before a major fault, thanks to early warning sensors and systems made possible through IoT.

It could lead, as well, to greater automation, as sensors, drones, and robots could communicate with each other and with established datasets to make their way around factory environments.

User-Centric Mobile Experiences

With the growth of mobile apps in the business space comes the critical concern of user experience, and designing tools used in various businesses and organizations with the needs of the user in mind is critical for the adoption of new technology.

As we enter a new technological generation for businesses, adaptation means survival.

Various tools can help with this, most notably the increase in AI-powered helper tools that can perform commands via natural language processing, but even outside of this, the general evolution of technological literacy and smart device usage ensures a language of intuitive control.

In 2024, with so much extra technology available and the rise of even more powerful devices and higher-capacity internet, this trend will only escalate.

Sustainable Mobility

As with every other aspect of business, the question of sustainability has become an ever more pressing issue when it comes to mobility services and tools.

Questions surrounding the power usage of data centers, the water use in their cooling systems, and the environmental effect of the rare metals used to power a lot of devices that make enterprise mobility even possible have been asked and will continue to be asked.

However, with the first-ever sodium-ion batteries free of rare metal usage and several other evolutions in sustainable technology, 2024 has the potential to be the dawn of the future when it comes to ecologically conscious business mobility.