Exploring the year of AI

International media organisations have always represented far more than merely news outlets. Given the sheer unrelenting wave of not just facts, but statistics, predictions, expert comment and, often, quite cutting-edge analysis, I’ve always regarded them as information hubs, filtering, collating and feeding just about anything and everything worth knowing. Back in the days when I started, most of this involved analogue telephones, fax machines, ticker-tape ribbons – remember the AP wirephoto? - and trading-floor style noise, rather than everything - digital, mobile and social – arriving on a three-inch screen.

I mention that for two reasons. Firstly, however all this is delivered, it brings a far greater and more authorative level of data and intelligence and in a way that couldn’t have been predicted even at the time Rupert Murdoch was launching his Astra satellite and taking communications to a new level.

That opinion is still crossing my desk, albeit at an unrelenting pace and across time zones. But when it comes to predicting the future, it tends to mirror the second point on anything AI-related, calling on experience to admit that given the pace of change we have witnessed, we simply don’t know what the future holds, certainly in the long term.

One common theme since the start of the year is that 2024 may well be the year of AI. And I think that’s a safe bet if we apply sensible parameters and don’t think too hard about the shift from (narrow) AI to the sort of AGI that has made some of the biggest players want to press the pause button.

According to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2020,” AI is expected to replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025. A common view seems to be: if 2022 was the year generative AI invaded the public sphere, and 2023 was the year of business adoption, 2024 promises to be the year of practical integration. One eye-catching view expressed recently was that the evolution of generative AI has mirrored that of computers, albeit on a dramatically accelerated timeline. Massive, centrally operated mainframe computers gave way to PCs whose codeless interfaces made then equally appealing to living rooms as offices, which itself accelerated its advancement, thanks to the input of those seeing them as a hobby, and even something to be monetised.

“Generative AI has already reached its ‘hobbyist’ phase, and as with computers, further progress aims to attain greater performance in smaller packages. 2023 saw an explosion of increasingly efficient foundation models,” said Dave Bergmann of Brooklyn in the IBM blog. The best of them achieved what he called parity with leading proprietary models, “enhanced with fine-tuning techniques and datasets developed by the open source community, many open models can now outperform all but the most powerful closed-source models on most  benchmarks despite far smaller parameter counts.”

I was contacted in January by Dr Luis Espinosa-Anke, AMPLYFI’s Head of Machine Learning and lecturer at the University of Cardiff, where I’d often spoken in the past on media matters. He wanted to discuss ideas for a business article detailing what he called “the Year of the AI payoff”, mirroring what Bergmann had called the pivotal year. Similarly, Sam Richardson, a CX consultant at Twilio, was predicting new levels of investment and disruption. “AI is by no means new,” he told me, “but the likes of ChatGPT and generative AI meant that 2023 was the year that we saw a heightened focus on this technology. AI technologies are indeed worth the investment, but this investment will not yield the right business outcomes if organisations don’t get their data in order first.

“As a result, we’re starting to see a renewed focus on getting ROI from tech spend. Businesses are re-directing their attention towards creative problem-solving to improve customer engagement, efficiency and value to customers. Looking ahead to 2024, there will be a more mature understanding that AI is one tool to support a well-considered engagement strategy, not the silver bullet to success without a strong tech stack more broadly.”

Rena Bhattacharyya, Chief Analyst of Enterprise Technology and Services research at GlobalData, said the “world will look toward Europe” and the AI Act, as regulagtory frameworks become more critical. “The rest of the world will begin to discuss similar frameworks and the debate around the use of copyrighted content to train AI models will be top of mind for executives.”

Keith Fenner, GM EMEA at Diligent, tells me: “This is the year of responsible AI. There has been a monumental shift in focus to establish AI policies and regulations.” With the AI Act now endorsed by all 27 EU Member States the onus will be on businesses to dedicate efforts to compliance, given the ‘potential for hefty fines’ – up to €35 million or 7 % of global turnover for breaches.

“Many will be embroiled in complex AI governance strategies involving mapping, classifying, and categorising all systems as well as gap assessments to evaluate if current policies and regulations can be applied to AI, stressing the need to find the right balance between innovation and regulation.”

Ben Parker, CEO at eflow Global described to me how the rise of AI is transforming the trading landscape. “It is fuelling massive advances in datadriven trading, but it also has a darker potential to not only execute illegal financial trades but cover them up.

The problem is that AI and traders don’t need to operate within borders. And currently, regulations do. New research has now revealed that three quarters of all compliance managers believe cross-border regulatory challenges are an issue for their organisations.”

I’m also looking forward to picking up on a conversation with Faisal Husain, the CEO of the 14,00-strong digital transformation specialists Synechron about how the management role is changing in the face of challenges from AI-driven decision making and how they mist adapt to AI-driven disruption and use technology to support human decisions, rather than letting it take over.

While I’m assured, he has no plans to step aside himself, he does make the point that the Chinese gaming company NetDragon Websoft has already appointed its own AI-powered robot as CEO and the company has outperformed Hong Kong’s stock market ever since.

And Microsoft recently drew my attention to their blog which detailed how enhanced AI capabilities in Teams designed to empower users to overcome the most common challenges of flexible work and enable organisations to reimagine their ways of working.

Microsoft Copilot is currently estimated to be helping people to be 70 % more productive and is improving the quality of their work by 68 %. Current estimates, according to the orignators, suggest that users save more than 10 hours of easted time per month.

I also recall Marc Warner, CEO at Faculty, who arrived back from the World Economic Forum to announce that “AI was the star of the show” He added: “It is now down to CEOs and world leaders to take a more nuanced view of the future of AI - and one that’s neither too pessimistic nor overly optimistic.”

Many in the know are anticipating major progress in AI tools designed to speed up scientific discoveries on a global scale such as energy crises and climate change, much in the way Microsoft are using AI to improve weather predictors and carbon estimators. AI is also expected to become more accessible on a more personal level, thanks to the likes of more affordable SLMs’ ability to perform as well as Large Language Models nuanced and integrated in technologies that improve everyday tasks and help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.

As for the future. While it’s clear to anyone who has witnessed first-hand the changes in Information Technology (yes, Mozaic seems like only yesterday), it’s certainly not as far away as first thought, although predictions vary.

It was only last year that Geoffrey Hinton, the man known as the Godfather of AI, quit his job at Google so that he could talk openly about the dangers, but, even though it seems like a mere few years ago I discovered an algorithm could check my spelling, the tech I so multi-faceted – from language generation to logical reason and creativity – it’s hard to pin down what progress means.

One thing is for sure though. The prediction AI pioneer Herbert A Simon once made that “machines will be capable, within 20 years of doing any work a man can do” was reassuringly premature. He said that in 1965.