When an IT team spends more time documenting its uses of generative AI than deploying new tools, it is clear that the IT landscape has fundamentally changed. In 2024, technological trends are no longer just a list of buzzwords. They translate into regulatory constraints, budgetary decisions, and skills that need to be urgently acquired, often within tight deadlines.
AI Compliance and Cybersecurity: The Real Challenge for IT Teams in 2024-2026
There is a lot of talk about generative artificial intelligence, language models, and augmented productivity. On the ground, the priority for CIOs has shifted to a less publicized topic: absorbing new compliance obligations without paralyzing ongoing projects.
The European AI regulation (AI Act) has begun to have concrete effects. Since August 2025, providers of general-purpose AI (GPAI) models must provide technical documentation, copyright policies, and public summaries of training data. For models deemed to be of systemic risk, the requirements are stricter.
This timeline directly alters the IT roadmap. Some obligations classified as “high-risk” have been postponed to 2027 and 2028, creating a tunnel effect: teams know they will have to comply, but hesitate between anticipating now or waiting for the final texts. Feedback on this point varies depending on the size of the organization and its exposure to the European market.
On the cybersecurity side, the link with AI governance has become direct. The CNIL emphasizes that certain models can create major risks, particularly through misuse to launch cyberattacks. In other words, deploying an AI tool without an associated security policy is akin to opening a breach. Companies that still separate their “AI” and “security” teams are falling behind.
To keep up with these developments on a daily basis, regular analyses can be found in Geek Newz’s IT universe, which covers both product announcements and regulatory issues.
IT Skills to Recruit: Beyond the AI Developer
The digital transformation of companies is no longer hindered by technology itself. It is hindered by the profiles capable of managing it within a constrained framework. There is a clear shift in recruitment needs.
The positions that are booming are not the ones one might expect. The AI developer remains in demand, but companies are primarily struggling to find hybrid profiles: individuals who understand both information systems, regulations, and project management.
- AI Compliance Officer: a role that did not exist two years ago, responsible for mapping AI usage within the company and documenting their risk levels according to the categories of the European regulation.
- Cloud Security Architect: the migration to the cloud continues, but data sovereignty and encryption requirements are changing the criteria for infrastructure selection.
- Data Governance Officer: the quality of training data is becoming a legal issue, not just a technical one. This profile bridges the IT department, legal, and business functions.
- Adversarial Testing Specialist (AI Red Teaming): systemic risk models must undergo robustness evaluations. This expertise comes from the cybersecurity world but is applied to artificial intelligence systems.
The concrete problem: these skills are rare and expensive. IT teams often absorb these tasks in addition to their existing workload, leading to technical debt and delays in development projects.
Quantum Computing and Edge Computing: Where Do We Really Stand on the Ground
Quantum computing is mentioned among the trends every year. On the ground, the situation remains the same for the majority of companies: no quantum application is in production in traditional IT departments.
What changes in 2024 is the realization that the quantum threat to encryption is no longer theoretical within a ten-year horizon. Organizations managing sensitive data (health, defense, finance) are beginning to inventory their encryption algorithms to prepare for migration to post-quantum standards. This is foundational work, not spectacular, but critical.
Edge computing, on the other hand, is progressing in a more tangible way. Processing data as close to its source as possible (industrial sensors, connected vehicles, points of sale) reduces latency and dependence on centralized cloud services. The most mature use cases involve predictive maintenance in industrial settings and real-time video analysis.
What Still Blocks Large-Scale Adoption
The main barrier is not technological. It is the lack of interoperability standards between the edge platforms of different providers. A company deploying edge nodes with one provider often finds itself locked into its ecosystem, complicating multi-site management.
IT teams must also manage the security of these distributed nodes, which expand the attack surface. Here we find the direct link between technological deployment and the ability of teams to maintain a consistent level of security across the entire infrastructure.
Data Governance and Digital Sovereignty: The Budgetary Trade-off of 2025
European companies face a trade-off that trend articles rarely mention: the cost of sovereignty. Hosting data in Europe, using SecNumCloud qualified cloud solutions, training teams on GDPR requirements and now the AI Act, all come at a price.
For an SME, the compliance budget can represent a significant portion of the annual IT envelope. This is not a barrier to innovation; it is a prioritization constraint. One cannot simultaneously migrate to a sovereign cloud, deploy generative AI tools, strengthen cybersecurity, and train teams, unless one has resources that most organizations do not have.
The development of AI in companies is not slowing down, however. It is structuring itself differently: rather than random experiments, targeted deployments are emerging, documented from the start, with an integrated governance framework. It is less spectacular than a proof of concept launched in two weeks, but it is what sustains over time.
The IT trends of 2024 ultimately tell a single story: technology is advancing rapidly, but organizations’ ability to manage it is not keeping pace. The teams that succeed are those that understand that compliance, security, and innovation are not three separate issues, but three facets of the same project.
