Image: adaask/Getty Images.
According to research and consulting firm Forrester, generative AI is the most significant technological advancement since the Internet.
In its forecasts for 2024, artificial intelligence has a special place. Indeed, according to the firm, generative AI will bring changes across all business functions and industries. “It’s time to think big and act fast. 2024 will redefine business as we know it,” said Sharyn Leaver, head of research at Forrester. “Businesses will rely on generative AI to improve, empower and engage their employees and customers – with or without you. Agree to take a step aside to see the bigger picture. »
15 predictions for 2024
Here are Forrester’s top 15 predictions for 2024:
- Generative AI will enter consumers’ lives. 60% of skeptics will use (and enjoy) generative AI, even without knowing it.
- AI will drive the era of creativity. AI initiatives in business will increase productivity and creative problem solving by 50%. Current AI-related projects are already reporting improvements of up to 40% in software development tasks.
- Agencies will bet big on “brand specific” AI models. The world’s top 10 agencies will spend $50 million on partnerships to create personalized AI solutions for their clients.
- AI will hit a wall in 2024. Limits in chip availability will reduce irrational expectations of artificial intelligence and return to common sense.
- The clouds will offer prompt engineering services in vain. 80% of companies will hire professionals with prompt engineering skills. With incomplete contextual data and limited experience with natural language and prompt engineering among data scientists, first-generation prompt engineering services from cloud providers will not be enough to meet personalized and refined needs.
- Backstage will take center stage. The open source framework created by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Backstage, will become the number one framework for developing self-service portals.
- Generative AI will increase the capabilities of customer service agents. Customer experience (CX) will see improvements for the first time in three years. These improvements will be seen particularly in Europe and the APAC region. In North America, the United States will improve while Canada will continue to struggle.
- Marketers will become privacy champions. CMOs from five major brands will fund dedicated privacy resources. Yet only 17% of decision-makers say their organization’s privacy team has marketing skills or abilities. To overcome this bottleneck, five major B2C brands will dedicate part of their marketing budget to funding additional staff for the privacy team and/or improving the skills of employees already in charge of this mission.
- Business purchasing preferences will be changed by generational differences. Two out of five Millennial buyers want to quickly consult a B2B product expert. Forrester estimates that 40% of young buyers consider a personal conversation with a product expert to be among the most meaningful interactions. Top sellers should forge effective partnerships with these experts and effectively orchestrate all interactions. Those who practice this method will see the time they spend on direct buyer engagement rise to 25% or more of their work week.
- Employee experience will no longer be a priority. In 2024, many employee experience (EX) teams will suffer from a lack of funding or attention. Take the example of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) investments in business: the percentage of companies having funded a strategy and staff on these issues fell by 33% in 2022, and is expected to drop to 27% in 2023. Forrester predicts this number will drop to 20% by the end of 2024, in the wake of budget and headcount reductions already affecting these teams. Investments in technology won’t drive EX growth either: even though 66% of decision makers say they want to invest in human capital management software next year, those investments won’t be used to their full advantage.
- Europe will be a pioneer in the adoption of hybrid working. 40% of European employees will regularly work from home. Only 11% of European business leaders expect their employees to return to the office full time. For comparison, in 2023, 28% of American employees’ working days will be devoted to teleworking.
- Employee experience will be affected by climate risk. Employee actions will force five Fortune 500 companies to adapt.
- Public trust will remain paramount. News organizations will once again become reliable sources of information. According to Forrester data for 2023, the reputation of social media is disintegrating worldwide: 81% of online adults in the US, UK, Spain and Italy agree that there is a lot of fake news and erroneous information. 63% of online adults in mainland China share this feeling.
- Customers will find it difficult to trust businesses in the APAC region. 25% of multinationals in APAC will make customer trust a key mission, but only 5% will measure it. Forrester estimates that by the end of 2024, 25% of the largest companies in this region will express a strategic commitment to customer trust, but only 5% will actually codify this commitment through organizational metrics and KPIs .
- Generative AI will be in the crosshairs of regulators. An application using ChatGPT will be fined for its processing of certain personally identifiable information.
Concerns about generative AI
Concerns about the rise of generative AI revolve around both its ethics and biases as well as securing our data, and 81% of people experiencing generative AI want a human to stay in the process to review and validate the results produced by artificial intelligence.
Businesses need a new operating model to compete in an AI-powered economy.
To learn more about Forrester’s research and its forecasts for 2024, click here.
Source: ZDNet.com