The year 2024 has laid regulatory foundations, accelerated certain field uses, and begun to sort the technological promises that hold from those that are fading.
European AI Act: what technical teams need to anticipate now
The most structuring trend of 2024 in tech does not come from a product, but from a legal text. The European AI Act is gradually coming into effect, with concrete obligations becoming operational from 2025-2026 depending on the categories of systems. We are talking about requirements for transparency, human oversight, and technical documentation.
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The common reflex is to think that only large groups are concerned. Field feedback shows the contrary: a SME using a SaaS tool that integrates AI (customer scoring, application sorting, support chatbot) potentially falls within the scope of the AI Act. The question is no longer whether we “do AI,” but whether the tool we use does it for us.
Concretely, this involves mapping the AI components present in the software stack, identifying associated risk levels, and documenting automated decision-making processes. This internal governance topic now occupies as much space as product announcements on tech news on Newsyoung.
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Generative AI in 2024: consolidation rather than linear growth
The enthusiasm around generative AI dominated 2023. In 2024, we are entering a different phase. The data available on the French market shows a shift: traffic related to AI tools in France has decreased over several months at the beginning of 2026, a sign that public adoption is plateauing after the initial wave.
On the ground, teams that have deployed AI assistants internally report mixed results. Productivity gains exist for specific tasks (draft generation, document summarization, tabular data processing). However, feedback varies on the reliability of outputs for tasks with high precision requirements.
Where generative AI delivers on its promises
- Draft writing and rephrasing of technical content, where time savings are measurable and the risk of error is controllable through human proofreading
- Analysis and summarization of large documentary corpuses, particularly in the legal and financial sectors
- Rapid code prototyping, provided there is a team capable of verifying and correcting the output
A common pitfall is deploying a generative AI tool without defining a validation workflow. This leads to content or automated decisions that no one supervises, which poses a direct issue regarding the AI Act.
CES 2024 and tech shows: beyond announcements, the ground signals
CES 2024 in Las Vegas brought together over 4,000 exhibitors, with a massive presence of French startups. Artificial intelligence was everywhere, from health to transportation.
What captures professionals’ attention more is the convergence between several technological components on specific use cases. Robotics coupled with vision AI is advancing in logistics and agriculture. Mixed reality is beginning to find industrial applications beyond entertainment, particularly for remote assisted maintenance.
Three signals to watch after CES 2024
Long-lasting tech (products designed to last and be repaired) marks a shift from the rapid obsolescence cycle. Contactless gestures and multisensory interfaces are also progressing, driven by more precise and less expensive sensors.
Quantum computing continues to move out of the theoretical realm. Several industrial players are investing in concrete use cases (logistics chain optimization, molecular simulation), although large-scale commercial applications remain on the horizon of the end of the decade.
Digital compliance and GreenTech: constraints becoming trends
In 2024, talking about tech trends without mentioning regulatory constraints is like describing a construction site without discussing the building permit. Beyond the AI Act, the CSRD directive imposes new extra-financial reporting obligations on companies that directly affect IT departments.
GreenTech is no longer a marketing argument but an operational constraint. Infrastructure teams must measure and reduce the carbon footprint of their data centers, optimize the energy consumption of AI processing, and document their efforts for sustainability reports.
- Energy optimization of AI models (reducing model size, local inference rather than systematic cloud) is becoming a technical selection criterion
- Carbon monitoring tools integrated into CI/CD pipelines are beginning to spread among DevOps teams
- Private 5G, deployed on industrial sites, allows for reduced latency while controlling the network perimeter, with growing interest in manufacturing and logistics
These constraints create a new market, that of RegTech (regulatory compliance technologies), which has been experiencing sustained growth for the past two years. Automated compliance, KYC, and AI risk management tools are gradually integrating into enterprise stacks.
The year 2024 will remain the year when tech had to contend with its own rules of the game. Teams that have gotten ahead on AI compliance and environmental reporting find themselves better positioned than those who have only chased after the latest trendy feature.