What Year 2 of the AI craze will look like, according to 41 experts

Kiran Raj, practice head, disruptive tech, GlobalData

For individual consumers, generative AI opens doors to personalized services, from shopping recommendations to educational assistance. ChatGPT can serve as a virtual tutor, while Midjourney can assist in creative endeavors like art and music. Financial and healthcare guidance, lifestyle management, and travel planning are other areas where AI can deliver significant benefits, offering personalized advice and suggestions. As these tools integrate more deeply into platforms and services, they are set to enhance efficiency, creativity, and convenience for businesses and consumers alike.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst, the Enderle Group

Expect to see these tools used heavily for customer support, telesales, and for customer relationship management. Initial studies have shown that the effective use of these tools for customer interface purposes increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention, reducing customer churn with positive impacts on both the top and bottom line.  

Catherine Roggero-Lovisi, CEO, Modern Meadow

AI tools are particularly valuable when a large amount of clean data is available and where connections and correlations between those data sets can be mapped relatively easily. With this in mind, in the Biomaterials space where Modern Meadow operates, AI tools will be helpful in many ways. First, supporting consumers when navigating overwhelming amounts of information on product and material. AI tools will allow them to easily find the most sustainable options while avoiding being swayed by fake news.

Moez Draief, manager, Mozilla.ai

Even one-year predictions are complex when it comes to such transformative and fast-evolving technology like AI. With their state-of-the-art semantic capabilities, ChatGPT-like models have the potential to transform the search experience for customers. This decades-old transverse problem faces today’s issues related to data privacy or hallucination and factuality. Research that will be conducted over the next year, both at the fundamental levels of AI science and on the engineering side, will enable for customers and businesses to better make use of their data.

Steve Won, chief product officer, 1Password

The 2024 election cycle will pollute our virtual town square with disinformation and disillusionment at unprecedented levels. Generative AI will be the ringleader, driving a steady flow of social engineering that will foster an unprecedented environment of distrust online. The upside is that this will be the tipping point for rejuvenating how we connect with each other. Big Tech, security, and government will need to come together in the coming years to develop meaningful solutions to clean up the virtual town square and reduce disinformation from our lives.

Peter Chapman, president and CEO, IonQ

In the upcoming year, I foresee that AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney will continue to transform how businesses operate and enhance their customer experiences. What really excites me is the potential of new quantum techniques to make these AI models faster and more efficient, ultimately reducing costs and environmental impact. This will make these AI models more accessible and speed up their adoption in the business world.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of AI, Snowflake

Over the next year and beyond, we are going to see language models with specialized skills for SQL writing and API calling become glue layers in enterprise interoperability between applications. These have the potential to break down silos-—today, each app lives in its own world—and create a whole new category of mashup applications that are quick to create and effective in practice. The technology for these applications and autonomous agents to automatically take actions is still early, but we can expect a lot of breakthroughs next year.

Ron Hause, SVP, head of AI, Shape Therapeutics

Today, many drugs and gene therapies are prohibitively expensive. Generative AI-enabled drug discovery and design—as well as innovations in manufacturing and drug delivery—will change that. Major breakthroughs for patient health are just around the corner.

Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer, Canva

Single-function AI tools like Midjourney helped to bring a focus to generative AI, but in the year ahead, the technology will only truly bridge the gap to the masses via tools that are integrated into their actual workflows. This won’t just change the way that people create or edit images, but also the way they work—helping them to save hours of time with AI workflows that eliminate mundane tasks. It’ll enable work they mightn’t have even attempted before.

Roger Thornton, cofounder and general partner, Ballistic Ventures

Product managers are using LLMs to create working prototypes of the functionality they need engineering to implement, which challenges the very nature of how we develop software. In many cases, the code handed over to engineering is very close to commercial release. This has enormous implications to the way we structure software teams and may very well usher in the ability for domain experts to go from concept to code without the need for large engineering teams. 

Henrique Dubugras, founder and co-CEO, Brex 

As AI tools evolve, they can act as the silent assistant that helps bridge the gap such that a non-finance employee who’s making a purchase gets assistance to do what the finance person would want: Spend within budget while documenting and categorizing it properly. It’s this invisible help that actually will be the next platform shift. Particularly for finance and accounting teams, next year I think we’ll see a meaningful progression of AI’s applications that will enable them to focus on more strategic and proactive work, reducing repetitive data entry and analysis tasks. 

Roberto Masiero, SVP of innovation, ADP 

A generative AI tool could tell an HR professional that an employee hasn’t taken a vacation recently and might suggest reaching out to the person about taking some time off to avoid burnout. Another example: What if someone recently got married or had a baby? The generative AI tool could alert an HR pro that it might be time to resend benefits information to that employee. Human-sensitive nudges help people through the most important transactions of life and can create a happier experience for employees.

Victoria Espinel, president, BSA (Business Software Alliance)

If the past year was about building understanding of AI, then the year to come will be about putting to work some of the unique capabilities of generative AI. But we need thoughtful, globally consistent rules that work to reduce risks to build trust in AI. If we want businesses and consumers to benefit from responsible AI in the next year, governments need to act.

Chris Bedi, chief digital information officer, ServiceNow

Generative AI will . . . affect employee expectations for the technology they use at work, becoming table stakes for talent retention. If we don’t provide employees with GenAI solutions, I feel like it is asking them to use a typewriter when word processors are available. 

Robert Blumofe, CTO and EVP, Akamai Technologies

Right now, many applications are simple productivity enhancers to help employees, students, musicians, developers, and more perform tasks more efficiently and at a quicker speed. But as AI is integrated with other tools—for example, retrieval of company-specific data or online services, such as weather forecasts—and adjusted to serve various industries, we will start to see really interesting use cases emerge. 

Michelle Taite, CMO, Intuit Mailchimp

The biggest benefit I see to adopting generative AI right now is leveraging good data to create and scale personalized experiences. Generative AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of individual customer data points and create individualized content won’t just benefit larger brands and enterprise organizations, either. The simplistic nature of generative AI has the power to act as an equalizer for small and mid-size businesses.

Chris Helsel, SVP, global operations, CTO, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

We can use [AI] as a tool to drive more efficiency within our organization’s product development, synthesizing decades of testing data, and enhancing our ability to forecast supply and demand planning. We already use AI to proactively predict tire service and leak protection based on billions of sets of historic data that can help reduce downtime for fleets, significantly helping our customers be more efficient.

Adam Williams, VP, product, global platforms, Iron Mountain

One of the biggest pain points we hear from customers is that they can’t find the information they’re looking for—and we’re excited about how generative AI can play a role in solving that in the coming year. What if you could ask your documents, your records, or your company data a question? For example, whether a specific document is signed? Or how many citizens born in a specific country are leveraging a specific service? Or the length of time a task takes at each stage of the supply chain?

Ding’An Fei, chairman, Investing.com 

For consumers, the multimodal chat apps will combine the utility of Wikipedia, search, voice-operated personal assistant with vastly intuitive multi-turn interface, and its experience will improve dramatically. Foundational model supercharged consumer applications in vertical areas like social, media, education, finance, entertainment, and others will also be widely adopted. These will come from both incumbent companies and startups.

Jun Hong Heng, founder & CIO, Crescent Cove Advisors 

We believe that generative AI tools are set to be a visionary force in various fields and we view the productivity gains, eventually, could be as impactful as the widespread electrification in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the transformation might be gradual over a few years, but users of generative AI tools are already seeing productivity gains.

Eliot Andres, cofounder, PhotoRoom

We’re seeing that AI in photo-editing tools is helping remove friction in the creative process for photography professionals and small businesses in e-commerce and retail. As the labor-intensive side of photo-editing is automated by AI, the role of the photographer is shifting the creative side of photography as an art form: the style, the tone, and the graphic elements of an image. The opportunity with AI in photo editing is to use incredibly complex and sophisticated technology to make the act of creating and editing photos feel easier and more intuitive than ever before.

Steve Sewell, CEO, Builder.io

The transformative aspect of generative AI in today’s business landscape is its integration into broader tool chains. The combination of large language models with targeted, specialized models is where we are witnessing real, tangible progress.

Teri Ellison, chief human resources officer, SHL

AI tools will revolutionize the role of HR professionals. We’re already seeing the benefits of using this technology to automate some of the day-to-day HR activities and administrative tasks; for example, using generative AI to do the first draft of a job description or company-owned bots responding to basic employee questions and requests. Finding ways to use tech to support repeatable tasks is key for freeing up time and resources to allow people to focus on higher value work.

Vikram Chatterji, cofounder and CEO, Galileo (former product lead at Google AI)
The next year of ChatGPT and Midjourney will likely usher in a proliferation of business apps—a “custom GPT” for every function within an organization that deals with repetitive tasks, across finance, legal teams, and more. OpenAIs GPTs “App Store,” where folks don’t even need to know how to code to create personalized GPTs, was a big leap forward in this direction.

Florian Douetteau, CEO, Dataiku 

Generative AI will enable firms to integrate and analyze both private and public financial information on another scale. AI tools will synthesize data from earnings calls and comprehensive reports, providing a deeper understanding of company and market health. In scientific research, next year will bring a leap in generative AI assistance. Researchers will have sophisticated AI tools at their disposal that can compare their work against others around the world, predicting future research trajectories and identifying unexplored areas that are ripe for discovery.

Kiran Raj, practice head, disruptive tech, GlobalData

For individual consumers, generative AI opens doors to personalized services, from shopping recommendations to educational assistance. ChatGPT can serve as a virtual tutor, while Midjourney can assist in creative endeavors like art and music. Financial and healthcare guidance, lifestyle management, and travel planning are other areas where AI can deliver significant benefits, offering personalized advice and suggestions. As these tools integrate more deeply into platforms and services, they are set to enhance efficiency, creativity, and convenience for businesses and consumers alike.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst, the Enderle Group

Expect to see these tools used heavily for customer support, telesales, and for customer relationship management. Initial studies have shown that the effective use of these tools for customer interface purposes increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention, reducing customer churn with positive impacts on both the top and bottom line.  

Catherine Roggero-Lovisi, CEO, Modern Meadow

AI tools are particularly valuable when a large amount of clean data is available and where connections and correlations between those data sets can be mapped relatively easily. With this in mind, in the Biomaterials space where Modern Meadow operates, AI tools will be helpful in many ways. First, supporting consumers when navigating overwhelming amounts of information on product and material. AI tools will allow them to easily find the most sustainable options while avoiding being swayed by fake news.

Moez Draief, manager, Mozilla.ai

Even one-year predictions are complex when it comes to such transformative and fast-evolving technology like AI. With their state-of-the-art semantic capabilities, ChatGPT-like models have the potential to transform the search experience for customers. This decades-old transverse problem faces today’s issues related to data privacy or hallucination and factuality. Research that will be conducted over the next year, both at the fundamental levels of AI science and on the engineering side, will enable for customers and businesses to better make use of their data.

Steve Won, chief product officer, 1Password

The 2024 election cycle will pollute our virtual town square with disinformation and disillusionment at unprecedented levels. Generative AI will be the ringleader, driving a steady flow of social engineering that will foster an unprecedented environment of distrust online. The upside is that this will be the tipping point for rejuvenating how we connect with each other. Big Tech, security, and government will need to come together in the coming years to develop meaningful solutions to clean up the virtual town square and reduce disinformation from our lives.

Peter Chapman, president and CEO, IonQ

In the upcoming year, I foresee that AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney will continue to transform how businesses operate and enhance their customer experiences. What really excites me is the potential of new quantum techniques to make these AI models faster and more efficient, ultimately reducing costs and environmental impact. This will make these AI models more accessible and speed up their adoption in the business world.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of AI, Snowflake

Over the next year and beyond, we are going to see language models with specialized skills for SQL writing and API calling become glue layers in enterprise interoperability between applications. These have the potential to break down silos-—today, each app lives in its own world—and create a whole new category of mashup applications that are quick to create and effective in practice. The technology for these applications and autonomous agents to automatically take actions is still early, but we can expect a lot of breakthroughs next year.

Ron Hause, SVP, head of AI, Shape Therapeutics

Today, many drugs and gene therapies are prohibitively expensive. Generative AI-enabled drug discovery and design—as well as innovations in manufacturing and drug delivery—will change that. Major breakthroughs for patient health are just around the corner.

Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer, Canva

Single-function AI tools like Midjourney helped to bring a focus to generative AI, but in the year ahead, the technology will only truly bridge the gap to the masses via tools that are integrated into their actual workflows. This won’t just change the way that people create or edit images, but also the way they work—helping them to save hours of time with AI workflows that eliminate mundane tasks. It’ll enable work they mightn’t have even attempted before.

Roger Thornton, cofounder and general partner, Ballistic Ventures

Product managers are using LLMs to create working prototypes of the functionality they need engineering to implement, which challenges the very nature of how we develop software. In many cases, the code handed over to engineering is very close to commercial release. This has enormous implications to the way we structure software teams and may very well usher in the ability for domain experts to go from concept to code without the need for large engineering teams. 

Henrique Dubugras, founder and co-CEO, Brex 

As AI tools evolve, they can act as the silent assistant that helps bridge the gap such that a non-finance employee who’s making a purchase gets assistance to do what the finance person would want: Spend within budget while documenting and categorizing it properly. It’s this invisible help that actually will be the next platform shift. Particularly for finance and accounting teams, next year I think we’ll see a meaningful progression of AI’s applications that will enable them to focus on more strategic and proactive work, reducing repetitive data entry and analysis tasks. 

Roberto Masiero, SVP of innovation, ADP 

A generative AI tool could tell an HR professional that an employee hasn’t taken a vacation recently and might suggest reaching out to the person about taking some time off to avoid burnout. Another example: What if someone recently got married or had a baby? The generative AI tool could alert an HR pro that it might be time to resend benefits information to that employee. Human-sensitive nudges help people through the most important transactions of life and can create a happier experience for employees.

Victoria Espinel, president, BSA (Business Software Alliance)

If the past year was about building understanding of AI, then the year to come will be about putting to work some of the unique capabilities of generative AI. But we need thoughtful, globally consistent rules that work to reduce risks to build trust in AI. If we want businesses and consumers to benefit from responsible AI in the next year, governments need to act.

Chris Bedi, chief digital information officer, ServiceNow

Generative AI will . . . affect employee expectations for the technology they use at work, becoming table stakes for talent retention. If we don’t provide employees with GenAI solutions, I feel like it is asking them to use a typewriter when word processors are available. 

Robert Blumofe, CTO and EVP, Akamai Technologies

Right now, many applications are simple productivity enhancers to help employees, students, musicians, developers, and more perform tasks more efficiently and at a quicker speed. But as AI is integrated with other tools—for example, retrieval of company-specific data or online services, such as weather forecasts—and adjusted to serve various industries, we will start to see really interesting use cases emerge. 

Michelle Taite, CMO, Intuit Mailchimp

The biggest benefit I see to adopting generative AI right now is leveraging good data to create and scale personalized experiences. Generative AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of individual customer data points and create individualized content won’t just benefit larger brands and enterprise organizations, either. The simplistic nature of generative AI has the power to act as an equalizer for small and mid-size businesses.

Chris Helsel, SVP, global operations, CTO, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

We can use [AI] as a tool to drive more efficiency within our organization’s product development, synthesizing decades of testing data, and enhancing our ability to forecast supply and demand planning. We already use AI to proactively predict tire service and leak protection based on billions of sets of historic data that can help reduce downtime for fleets, significantly helping our customers be more efficient.

Adam Williams, VP, product, global platforms, Iron Mountain

One of the biggest pain points we hear from customers is that they can’t find the information they’re looking for—and we’re excited about how generative AI can play a role in solving that in the coming year. What if you could ask your documents, your records, or your company data a question? For example, whether a specific document is signed? Or how many citizens born in a specific country are leveraging a specific service? Or the length of time a task takes at each stage of the supply chain?

Ding’An Fei, chairman, Investing.com 

For consumers, the multimodal chat apps will combine the utility of Wikipedia, search, voice-operated personal assistant with vastly intuitive multi-turn interface, and its experience will improve dramatically. Foundational model supercharged consumer applications in vertical areas like social, media, education, finance, entertainment, and others will also be widely adopted. These will come from both incumbent companies and startups.

Jun Hong Heng, founder & CIO, Crescent Cove Advisors 

We believe that generative AI tools are set to be a visionary force in various fields and we view the productivity gains, eventually, could be as impactful as the widespread electrification in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the transformation might be gradual over a few years, but users of generative AI tools are already seeing productivity gains.

Eliot Andres, cofounder, PhotoRoom

We’re seeing that AI in photo-editing tools is helping remove friction in the creative process for photography professionals and small businesses in e-commerce and retail. As the labor-intensive side of photo-editing is automated by AI, the role of the photographer is shifting the creative side of photography as an art form: the style, the tone, and the graphic elements of an image. The opportunity with AI in photo editing is to use incredibly complex and sophisticated technology to make the act of creating and editing photos feel easier and more intuitive than ever before.

Steve Sewell, CEO, Builder.io

The transformative aspect of generative AI in today’s business landscape is its integration into broader tool chains. The combination of large language models with targeted, specialized models is where we are witnessing real, tangible progress.

Teri Ellison, chief human resources officer, SHL

AI tools will revolutionize the role of HR professionals. We’re already seeing the benefits of using this technology to automate some of the day-to-day HR activities and administrative tasks; for example, using generative AI to do the first draft of a job description or company-owned bots responding to basic employee questions and requests. Finding ways to use tech to support repeatable tasks is key for freeing up time and resources to allow people to focus on higher value work.

Vikram Chatterji, cofounder and CEO, Galileo (former product lead at Google AI)
The next year of ChatGPT and Midjourney will likely usher in a proliferation of business apps—a “custom GPT” for every function within an organization that deals with repetitive tasks, across finance, legal teams, and more. OpenAIs GPTs “App Store,” where folks don’t even need to know how to code to create personalized GPTs, was a big leap forward in this direction.

Florian Douetteau, CEO, Dataiku 

Generative AI will enable firms to integrate and analyze both private and public financial information on another scale. AI tools will synthesize data from earnings calls and comprehensive reports, providing a deeper understanding of company and market health. In scientific research, next year will bring a leap in generative AI assistance. Researchers will have sophisticated AI tools at their disposal that can compare their work against others around the world, predicting future research trajectories and identifying unexplored areas that are ripe for discovery.