AI Boom in 2024: Predictions and Challenges

Thursday - December 28 2023, 23:45 UTC - 10 months ago

In 2024, AI is predicted to have a significant impact in the world of work, consumer experience, healthcare, and creativity. Predictions for the upcoming year suggest that businesses must ready themselves for the challenges and opportunities of AI as its usage increases.

Artificial intelligence had a breakout year in 2023 as large language models leapt from research curiosity to the hottest consumer product around. Given current levels of hype, next year could be make or break for the technology.

When ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, its wild success caught everyone by surprise, including its maker OpenAI. The chatbot became the fastest growing consumer product in history, reaching 100 million active users in just two months.

This set off an AI arms race between big tech companies and startups as everyone tried to catch OpenAI. Meanwhile, all kinds of more traditional businesses jumped on the generative AI bandwagon too. But it’s still early days, and despite real promise, the technology has its problems.

These AI models tend "hallucinate"—a nice way of saying they make things up—and it’s far from clear whether the quality of their outputs is good enough to create useful products. The fact they’ve been trained on mountains of data scraped from the internet has also raised a number of complex questions around privacy, bias, and copyright.

Nonetheless, the prevailing view is that the generative AI boom has just begun, and 2024 could be another banner year. Here we’ve gathered some of the most interesting predictions for where the technology could go next year.

One of the most consistent themes is that AI will become increasingly integrated into the world of work. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, predicts there will be mass adoption of AI tools by companies, leading to significant boosts in productivity. The impact will primarily be felt by white collar "knowledge workers," he says, though he expects it to augment jobs rather than automate them entirely.

This will be enabled by the infusion of AI into many of the software tools these workers rely on day to day. "Expect to see generative AI integrated into enterprise software, giving more knowledge workers the tools they need to work with greater efficiency and make better decisions," says Paul Silverglate, Deloitte’s US technology sector leader. "The way we work will be vastly different from this moment on." .

AI in the workplace will present particular challenges for managers, according to predictions from PwC, because they will not only have to learn how to use AI themselves, but also develop the ability to oversee teams where much of the work is done by AI-powered agents. "Few leaders today have both organizational and AI knowledge—and closing this gap will be critical," the report says.

Another test for businesses will be the use of "shadow AI." While companies may want to limit or control their employees’ use of these tools for privacy or security reasons, workers are likely to use unapproved tools if it makes their jobs easier. "Well-intentioned employees will continue to use generative AI tools to increase productivity," says Jay Upchurch, chief information officer at SAS. "And CIOs will wrestle daily with how much to embrace these generative AI tools and what guardrails should be put in place to safeguard their organizations." .

It won’t just be the work environment that sees the impact of AI. Consumers will start to take more control of the customer experience, using AI-powered solutions to make decisions, says Upchurch. For example, a phone technology built with AI and natural language processing algorithms can help customers find answers. A growing number of device makers will include this technology in their products, allowing customers to talk to their sinks, fridges, and more.

The healthcare industry is particularly likely to benefit. Predictions from Deloitte include the development of AI-enabled diagnostics and personalized treatments for certain medical conditions, among other applications. Meanwhile, startups Tecton and NuMedii have created programs that use AI to match medical treatments with patient symptoms and medical exam results. It may not be long before these programs become commonplace.

Finally, AI-fueled tools for creativity could become commonplace too. OpenAI has already released a project called DALL-E, which uses generative AI to create images based on text descriptions. If the project is successful, expect to see people using AI-powered image and video editing tools as well as digital assistants to support visual design tasks.

Whether these predictions come true or not, it's clear that 2023 was only the beginning. Generative AI is here and it won't be going anywhere anytime soon. As businesses and consumers increasingly adopt the technology, the challenges and opportunities will only grow. It's an exciting time to keep an eye on the industry.