Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024.  Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Rise of LGMs and other AI Trends to Watch in 2024

By Kamal Ahluwalia, President, Ikigai Labs

AI began to radically reshape enterprises from top to bottom this past year. In 2024, we'll see AI's impact continue to intensify. Whereas 2023 was the year of LLMs, next year will give rise to a new generative AI technology: Large Graphical Models (LGMs). In addition, the industry will focus more on AI education, delivering more affordable AI solutions, and the impact of AI on ESG efforts.

These emerging AI trends will define 2024.

LGMs become the next household gen AI tech in the enterprise 

Today, nearly every organization is experimenting with LLMs in some way. Next year, another major AI technology will emerge alongside LLMs: Large Graphical Models (LGMs). An LGM is a probabilistic model that uses a graph to represent the conditional dependence structure between a set of random variables. LGMs are probabilistic in nature, aiming to capture the entire joint distribution between all variables of interest. They are particularly suitable for modeling tabular data, such as data found in spreadsheets or tables.

LGMs are useful for analyzing time series data. By analyzing time series data through the novel lens of tabular data, LGMs are able to forecast critical business trends, such as sales, inventory levels and supply chain performance. These insights help guide enterprises to make better decisions.

This is game changing because existing AI models have not adequately addressed the challenge of analyzing tabular, time-series data (which accounts for the majority of enterprise data). Instead, Large language models (LLMs) and other models were created to analyze text documents. That's limited the enterprise use cases they're really capable of supporting: LLMs are great for building chatbots, but they're not designed to support detailed predictions and forecasting. Those sort of use cases offer organizations the most business value today - and LGMs are the only technology that enables them.

Enterprises already have tons of time-series data, so it'll be easy for them to begin getting value from LGMs. As a result, in 2024, LGM adoption will take off, particularly in retail and healthcare.  

AI upskilling will become a pivotal requirement to transform into a future-ready, diverse, and equitable workforce 

With the rapid advancements in AI and the evolving skills required for success in the AI-driven economy, companies will increase their investments in AI training. Training and education programs will emerge to help workers from all backgrounds develop the skills they need to thrive in the new workplace. As AI continues to revolutionize the workplace, its implementation poses a risk to exacerbating existing inequalities and further marginalizing underrepresented groups. AI companies will recognize this risk and take proactive steps to address this issue, such as developing AI systems that are fair and unbiased, as well as ensuring that AI-powered jobs are accessible to all.  

Next year will see a push for more affordable AI solutions 

Large language models are trained on internet-scale data, making them very compute-intensive and costly to implement. As a result, we're seeing most of the investment coming from big companies with deep pockets. This is hindering the ingenuity we've come to expect from startups and small companies which ultimately hurts both buyers and providers. 

If AI-powered solutions can only be delivered by the largest companies, then AI will not move at the pace we need it to. This will spur demand in the coming year for more computationally efficient and affordable AI solutions, enabling a more diverse and nimble set of solution providers to deliver AI-powered solutions across a wide range of use cases. 

AI Will Revolutionize ESG Practices in 2024 

With the rise of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) practices taking center stage, organizations will look for more computationally efficient models, such as LGMs, to reduce waste and drive sustainability efforts. By providing businesses with data-driven insights and innovative solutions to tackle environmental challenges, LGMs will revolutionize ESG practices. Organizations that leverage LGMs for AI-powered demand forecasting will pinpoint areas of waste generation and develop targeted strategies for reduction and maximizing resource utilization. 

Conclusion

Enterprises are eager to see real results from AI after doing a lot of experimentation in 2023. The trends outlined above demonstrate that AI is maturing fast and will transform businesses in the near future.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kamal Ahluwalia has a diverse and extensive work experience spanning over several decades. Kamal is currently serving as the President of Ikigai since 2023. From 2018 to 2023, he held the position of President at eightfold.ai. Before his role at eightfold.ai, Kamal worked at Conga as Chief Revenue Officer and as Chief Marketing Officer at Selectica.