Whether you’re a CEO or a software developer, a tax leader or a product designer, by the end of 2024, AI will enable you to do your job in new, more powerful ways. It will impact how companies grow revenue, conduct everyday operations, engage customers and employees, build new business models, and more.
We’ve been making AI predictions for seven years now. Based on this experience and our longstanding leadership in AI, we feel confident in making six new predictions for 2024. Some are already becoming full-fledged trends. Others are in the offing. All can lead to concrete actions that can create business value for many years to come.
1. The right AI choices will provide companies a significant edge
In 2024, many companies will find attractive ROI from GenAI, but only a few will succeed in achieving transformative value from it. Realising GenAI’s full potential requires more than just letting employees use new capabilities in enterprise applications. It requires taking advantage of GenAI’s capacity to be customised to your specific needs and its remarkable scalability — while also paying close attention to its potential risks.
One key is to avoid the use-case trap. If you use GenAI only in isolated instances, you’ll get only limited value. Instead, prioritise ‘patterns’ that can scale. For example, GenAI’s capacity to draw insights from unstructured data (such as text) can help nearly every knowledge worker grow capacity and make better decisions.
It’s important to provide workers with incentives to not just use the new technology but to use it to reimagine their jobs. Tech advances mean they can reinvent their work by finding ways to deploy and customise GenAI to automate some tasks and augment the rest.
2. GenAI will redefine the work of leaders as much as employees
No one yet knows the long-term impact of AI on overall employment, and 2024 will still be too soon for definitive answers. But AI will start to change how almost everyone — especially those at the highest levels — do their jobs. Whether in the C-suite or on the shop floor, people who know how to use AI will outcompete those who don’t.
Besides learning how to use AI responsibly, middle managers will need skills to oversee and assess teams in which AI agents do much of the work. Functional leads will have to understand how AI can not just augment processes but replace them. The C-suite will have to take the lead on AI-native operations and business models. Few leaders today have both organisational and AI knowledge — and closing this gap will be critical.
3. The moment of truth for trust in AI is coming
In 2024, AI will be an essential part of how your people interact with data, stakeholders and each other. Trust in AI will be critical — and that means more than just compliant, secure systems. It means deploying the right solutions for the right situation with the right data, policies and oversight to achieve relevant, reliable results. That requires responsible AI, an enterprise-wide approach and set of practices. Responsible AI can help everyone who develops and uses AI do so with an eye toward building trust.
This will be the moment of truth for responsible AI for two reasons. As GenAI takes on more work — writing financial reports, automating parts of software development, analysing proprietary data for go-to-market strategies and so on — mistakes could have wide-reaching impacts, including stalling transformation initiatives. We also suspect that we may see GenAI-related crime, such as a political deepfakes, hit the headlines. Many GenAI vendors now offer to indemnify customers for potential copyright infringements. That reduces one risk — but trust in the outcomes of your AI systems are still your responsibility.
4. GenAI will be the ‘missing link’ for data
GenAI can help you turn more data into more value more quickly — giving many data initiatives an attractive cost/benefit ratio that they may have lacked before. It can scan, read, summarise, translate, analyse and troubleshoot even highly unstructured data that’s trapped in presentations, strategy papers, customer logs and the countless other documents that define your organisation. GenAI can, in other words, answer one of the greatest challenges for many companies: processing and creating intelligence around large sets of complex, unstructured data.
Even so, GenAI can’t do it all. It still requires you to digitise data, move it to the cloud, enable GenAI to access it, assure reliability and compliance and manage risks.
5. GenAI will give rise to new classes of products and services
How businesses develop new offerings and revenue streams is changing dramatically. Building new processes, developing new products and services and creating new environments for customer engagement — all of these are becoming ‘no code’ activities thanks to GenAI.
We’re already seeing cloud-based enterprise applications incorporate more GenAI capabilities, but this is just the start. Soon, enterprise applications will have GenAI not as an add-on but as the core. These AI-based applications will be faster, more agile and more customisable than anything that has come before. We’ll also see products and services that result from GenAI’s convergence with other technologies, including machine learning. Extended reality devices, IoT networks, machine learning processes and others will soon be reliant on GenAI.
This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in PwC’s TechEffect. If you would like to learn more about using AI within your organisation in Australia, please contact Jahanzeb Azim.
