Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Navigating the Trough: 2024 Predictions Spotlight Generative AI’s Challenges, Impacting ‘Me Too’ Players
By Alon Goren, CEO, Mike Finley, CTO and Pete Reilly, COO at AnswerRocket
2023 witnessed a genAI gold rush, with businesses scrambling to stake their claim. GenAI has proven its potential to revolutionize the way businesses analyze, create, and compete. But with the dust settling, one question looms large: what’s next? This article explores five predictions that give us a glimpse into a year marked by strategic battles, cautious optimism, and a race to fully grasp the power of AI.
1. GenAI will cause a clash between executives as they vie for control over its agenda within the enterprise.
Nearly half of executives report that that their AI investments will increase next year to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, while 70% are already in generative AI exploration mode. Now that organizations are ramping up AI adoption in the enterprise, every executive wants to be the one to take their company on its AI journey. In 2024, the AI agenda will become more complex as more players join the struggle for control, from the CTO to the CIO to data analytics executives. The C-Suite will need to identify where their opportunities for AI lie and what conversations they must have with different departments to decide who should be the one to take the lead. In the meantime, CIOs are facing pressure from CEOs to expand their use of generative AI. In 2024, we will see CIOs continuing to push forward their exploratory AI experiments and projects as the battle continues.
2. Dashboards finally deliver on their hype, but only with the effective use of genAI to identify insightful analytics.
The rise of genAI has sparked debates about the relevance of dashboards, with some predicting their demise. However, this view neglects the fundamental strength of dashboards in providing a basic yet clear, and shared overview of business performance. Historically, their misuse in detailed analytics – attempting to answer complex questions like “Why is this number down?” – led to confusion rather than clarity.
In 2024, dashboards will still have a place in the enterprise as a valuable tool, but organizations will finally accept their limitations. GenAI-powered analytics agents will enable a pivotal shift. These agents are capable of advanced data analysis, whereas dashboards are not. AI agents can uncover underlying trends and insights, allowing dashboards to return to their original purpose: offering a clear, unified view of the business’s current state. This evolution will present a more streamlined approach to business intelligence. Dashboards will maintain a focus on overall business health, while genAI agents will delve into the complexities, extracting actionable insights. This synergy will optimize the use of both tools, ensuring comprehensive yet clear business analysis and decision-making.
3. The AI community begins to rally around open AI, beginning its path toward parity with closed AI.
Closed AI has a significant lead over open AI at the moment, with the former offering polished, enterprise-ready experience while the latter is still rough around the edges. However, next year we’ll see open AI begin to support compelling use cases and apps, which will demonstrate the potential of open AI. This will lead to increasing interest in the technology from the wider community, leading to growing adoption and more contributions to open AI.
4. “Me Too” AI Vendors Sink as genAI hits a trough of disillusionment.
Right now, generative AI is at the peak of its hype cycle. Next year, some organizations will become disillusioned when their AI investments don’t provide the transformation they’re expecting. Customers will grow wary of vendors that are late to the AI race, tacking on AI capabilities that provide little business value or compelling functionality. But organizations who use generative AI correctly – supporting proven use cases – can avoid this disillusionment and see the expected value from AI.
5. The Future of AI is Verticalized
From ChatGPT to Bard, we saw our fair share of general-purpose AI tools come to light this year. In 2024, we can expect to see a new wave of AI technology that will be tailored to each industry and individual profession. Almost every role, from doctors to bankers to marketers, will have its own verticalized generative AI assistant. We will also see tools specialized in every industry like retail and pharmaceutical. Some of these tools will be designed for both – marketers within the pharmaceutical industry, for instance. As opposed to the mainstream conversational AI tools many businesses are using today, tailored AI technologies will be more well-versed in each domain. Both organizations and their employees will be able to obtain reliable and deeper insights to become more productive and strategic than ever before.
2024 is a year for industry leaders to ditch the “me too” mentality and embrace innovation with genAI. Companies should forge alliances, share insights, and tailor solutions that tackle industry specific challenges. Rather than simply benefiting from genAI, leaders should set the goal of shaping the impact of AI for their entire ecosystem.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alon Goren
As CEO and founder of AnswerRocket, Alon leads product innovation and brings actionable analytics to business people, so they can get their questions answered faster.
Prior to founding AnswerRocket, Alon co-founded and was Chief Technology Officer of Radiant Systems for 25 years. He served as Radiant’s Chairman from 2004 to 2011, when the company was sold to NCR for $1.3 billion. Alon has a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Mike Finley
Mike’s work with AnswerRocket centers on discovering deep insights in business data with AI. His work in intelligent agent technology is built on a foundation of natural language processing, one of AnswerRocket’s core features. He focuses largely on the product – driving upgrades and delivering new functionalities to ensure customers can easily extract insights from their data.
Previously, Mike co-founded Qualia Labs, where he helped develop recognized innovations in the field of machine learning and big data. Before that, Mike built Radiant Systems and led the engineering, product marketing, and technical sales teams for massive retail transaction systems prior to acquisition by NCR, where he became CTO for SaaS systems, consumer products, and mobile development.
Pete Reilly
Pete leads the charge for acquiring customers and, subsequently, helping them launch AnswerRocket. Prior to AnswerRocket, Pete founded and led Retality, a firm focused on helping companies conceive, build, and introduce new technologies to the market.
Before Retality, Pete was a founding team member and SVP/GM of BlueCube Software, where he led the Workforce Management business unit before the company was sold to RedPrairie. BlueCube was a spin-out from Radiant Systems, where Pete spent eight years driving the development and market introduction of new products at the company. Pete got his start at Accenture working with Global 2000 organizations. Pete has a B.S. in Computer Science/Economics from Union College in Schenectady, NY.
