Revolution
In 2023, generative AI was the new kid on the block, the preternaturally chatty bot trained on large language models (LLMs) that captured business leaders’ imaginations and IT spend. Buoyed by massive hype, companies will have invested nearly $16 billion in generative AI software, hardware and IT/business services in 2023 alone, according to IDC.
But in 2024, will the bubble burst? Not likely: spending on generative AI products and services is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032, a report by Bloomberg Insights finds. Much of enterprise investment in the near term will be devoted to building out infrastructure and training LLMs.
Generative AI has captivated business leaders with its predictive capability. Unlike previous chatbots that only recognized and responded to specific words, generative AI can parse general context and predict the next words a person might use in a query.
But GenAI can’t predict the future (at least not yet). For our 2024 prognostications, we turned to six enterprise AI thought leaders to give their best takes on where the emergent technology will have the most impact in the coming year.
I always believe that if you are waiting for someone to tell you or show you what to do, you’re on the wrong side of innovation. And this is truer today than it ever was. The challenge is that legacy businesses tend to move slowly. The momentum they have offers the guise of success. Though building momentum requires energy, and the challenge with energy is that by the time you recognize you’re no longer generating it, you’ve started to slow. The energy required to not only survive waves of disruptive innovation, but to thrive through and beyond them, is greater and more significant than many businesses realize. Disruptive trends including the internet, mobile, social media, generative AI, and spatial computing, necessitate more than the digital transformation efforts largely exhibited by legacy organizations. This is more than a time for digitization, this is the time for innovation and digital “transformation.”
Honestly, we’re still building on business models that were invented in the 1960s and we’ve been using technology to keep them alive, which is why technical debt is a thing and why silos are still a thing.
For that reason, December 2024 might not look very different from December 2023. Change is slow. But disruptive innovation waits for no one. What we’re seeing today, and what we will still see next December, is the use of generative AI to automate existing processes. Those processes are in place because of legacy mindsets, which will be challenged when somebody finds a way to use generative AI to break out of that construct. But, we will also see signs of disruptive transformation, where companies start to imagine what AI-first organizations could look like, representing the next wave of business and operational model innovation.
I see this moment of generative AI in the next year as unlocking a division in capacity between those who don’t just use generative AI but understand how generative AI unlocks possibilities that didn’t exist before, those who use generative AI to improve what they did before and then those who haven’t started using it yet. This is an unprecedented opportunity for new leadership. This is an opportunity to build the next generation of companies. AI and disruptive innovation offers the chance to reimagine what it means to be a business today.
In order to be able to do what they want to do with generative AI, companies actually need to reduce the riskiness of the systems, and by doing so, they will be able to capture a huge amount of commercial value.
Think of it as if you were a car manufacturer and the steering mechanism on your car didn’t work properly. People would drive off the road if they use your car. That’s like the generative AI that’s currently out there. What’s really valuable is a car that has proper safeguards and steers correctly. Companies will recognize that as a competitive advantage, and in 2024 that will inform how they design and use generative AI responsibly.
More than that, those companies that embrace responsible AI will be better positioned to innovate. At Applied AI, we have two years of lab data that shows that those building AI safely are able to achieve more with it. Why? Because in AI, what safety looks like is your AI doing what you want it to do. All the evidence points to more responsible AI being more innovative and more exciting AI, and smart companies will embrace that in the coming year.
The real power of generative AI is in accessing information—in retrieving information from a source of ground truth in the enterprise, and then making that answer more conversational. Using large language models (LLMs) to access that information and make it conversational is really going to be the source of the greatest value.
The operationalization of LLMs and getting them into a production environment with good knowledge management—that’s going to make all the difference. That means that data and content need to be curated, updated, and that is going to be costly.
Executives will start to realize that generative AI is not a silver bullet and it is something that’s not going to automatically cure our past sins in poor data management or poor data hygiene. It is something that requires good data hygiene. In 2024, companies will put that focus on it, but there will be a lot of failed projects and wasted efforts because many companies that have jumped onto the generative AI bandwagon don’t have the experience in doing these things at a global scale.
In 2024, anyone who’s investing in nascent companies with capabilities in generative AI, or any AI, will be looking to see that ethical guardrails are baked into the product from day one. In part, that’s because regulation is starting to catch up with the technology. Just this month, the European Union passed the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law. But more importantly, companies will realize that they need to be more intentional about ethical guardrails as we’re rolling out this super powerful technology because it’s the right thing to do. It can go in either direction if there are no guardrails in place.
We talk about job losses because of AI, but it’s also creating a lot of new opportunities. One of the key roles that people will need are AI ethicists to make sure that those guardrails and frameworks are being built into the technology. AI has been around for some time, so AI ethicists already exist, but we will begin to see actual teams within organizations whose role is dedicated to making sure that ethical guidelines and frameworks are being followed when it comes to rolling out generative AI.
For years, organizations have struggled with creating helpful HR chatbots. Even with today’s advances in natural language processing, there’s an enormous amount of effort required to train them and they can still be clunky and stilted.
In 2024, generative AI will reinvent the HR chatbot to create a new support mechanism for employees. One of the opportunities with generative AI is going to be that it can know, using a large language model, what the employee is looking for and help guide them more directly through to the policy that they’re looking for, or even tying in directly into the workflow that they need to do. Not having to open a case, being able to handle your own transaction the way you’re thinking about, using generative AI to actually have a conversation about that instead of having to go through a chatbot which still feels very artificial is going to be one of the most important things that generative AI is going to allow us to do.
In the longer term, we’re exploring many exciting HR opportunities for the technology, but in the next 12 months, we will begin to see LLM-trained HR chatbots add real value to employee experience.
The diffusion of generative AI into marketing is actually going to be very uneven based on the company you work for and the industry that you’re in. But I think what we’ll see moving into early 2024 is much wider scale adoption of the technology because it’s going to be baked into the platforms people already use. But it’s so early. I’ve talked to some of the biggest companies in the world and I’ve yet to meet one that has a change management plan for this stuff. I think by the middle of next year, companies are going to start realizing how disruptive this is really going to be to their teams and their strategies.
What marketers will come to realize the more they work with this tool is that it will give us advanced capabilities and it will democratize creativity for people who weren’t creative before. If you weren’t a writer, you can be a writer. If you weren’t a designer or video producer, you can do those things now. If you already are one of those things, you can go to the next level.
