Let's look at what technology has in store for us in 2024. Machine intelligence, the blurring lines between the real and the virtual, and shaping the ongoing internet will transform how we work and play, unleashing human ingenuity, thinking, and creativity.
Generative AI Explosion
Generative AI's first wave in 2023 focused primarily on creating text or image content and finding information more intuitively. In 2024, I predict we will see a rapid expansion of its capabilities within our applications used daily. Generative AI will revolutionize our workflow, from automated code generation and debugging capabilities to making searching for information and communicating with others more natural, easy, and efficient.
More of us will realize its potential as it becomes more fully integrated into our workflow and acts as always-available intelligent personal assistants to make us more productive and efficient. These advancements could allow us to offload many aspects of mundane work, such as tedious information gathering, managing schedules, informing ideas, and organizing information. As these AI shifts happen, they could unlock our human creative power, changing the trajectory and speed of our decision-making.
Transformational Customer Experience Improvements
In 2024, customer experience improvements converge AI in multiple ways by tapping into and processing the diverse forms of data in our businesses and automatically integrating it behind the scenes with text, visual, and audio information. Customer service, sales inquiries, internal help desks, and human resources support will begin to transform into sophisticated customer-facing personal assistants and natural language-powered knowledge bases.
AI automation combined with behind-the-scenes work by customer service agents could enable businesses to answer questions more expediently and resolve customer experience issues on first contact, creating more customer satisfaction and loyalty. In the coming years, I see these experiences beginning to interpret emotions and adjust communication to become even more natural and precise to produce better outcomes.
Intelligent Applications
2024 could see the emergence of intelligent application capabilities in our daily work. Intelligent applications are AI-enabled and provide a rich, adaptive, personalized user experience.
User experiences could study our behavior, predict our needs, and transform application navigation to find what we are looking for and help us accomplish what we intend to do more effectively.
For example, they may proactively inform users of problems, such as an AI-powered budgeting application that analyzes and notifies them of your spending abilities. They may indicate the best nearby restaurants, hotels, and more in real time to help you make a booking that may have been impossible through manual searches.
Intelligent application design could ensure we receive the same experience on mobile, the web, and voice. Generative AI could even help incorporate innovative educational tools such as customized video and text, immersive and personalized entertainment experiences, and improved accessibility for disabled users.
Here Comes Quantum-Powered AI
I believe 2024 is the year quantum computing will begin to deliver noticeable benefits to society. Quantum computing combines vital concepts of quantum physics and modern computer science. The core computing concept, called Qubits, is based on two of the fundamentals of quantum physics: superposition and entanglement. A qubit can model two different states simultaneously instead of just a 0 or 1 in classical computing, allowing for vast parallel calculations. This power works well on optimization problems such as financial portfolio management and route planning because of Quantum's ability to quickly process vast amounts of data to find optimal solutions.
In 2024, AI will begin to capitalize on Quantum's unique advantages. Quantum can process enormous numbers of operations in a single step, making it an excellent processing environment for machine learning and predictive analytics. Consider its potential to accelerate genome sequencing and drug discovery, perform sophisticated financial model analysis and trend forecasting, and quantum simulations to model climate conditions and perform extreme weather forecasting to aid disaster preparedness. Quantum AI capabilities have enormous potential for solving challenges facing humankind.
The Virtual and Physical World Lines Continue To Blur
We spend more time in the digital world in virtual environments where we work and play. We collaborate remotely using Zoom, Slack, and Discord. Gaming and attending in-game events and esports have become mainstream entertainment. Social media apps like TikTok and Instagram allow us to consume short-form, easily digestible content curated by personalized algorithms. We share aspects from our physical world lives to create our digital persona in these applications. They act as spaces to connect with others as our virtual selves.
These concepts reinforce the blurring between the real and virtual worlds as our presence becomes established as digital avatars in the virtual world. Conceptually, the need for a digital twin is emerging across business and play. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical world object, process, or system. It can be as simple as a virtual car or as complex as a large city.
In 2024, the divide between the real and virtual worlds will continue diminishing. Affordable augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technology and our digital twins, coupled with AI, could create immersive digital worlds where spending time building human connections is acceptable. Virtual applications will likely emerge in the healthcare, retail, construction, media and entertainment, defense and aerospace, and manufacturing industries.
AI-Powered Cybersecurity Sophistication
2024 will see AI advancements emerge, shifting our cybersecurity abilities towards more intelligent and autonomous systems with proactive proficiency. Advanced AI analytics could help us analyze and predict system threats and improve detection capabilities to take action. Machine learning algorithm advancements could identify a wider breadth of threats more rapidly, enabling us to respond to cyber incidents more accurately and effectively.
We may also see AI-driven security bots designed to identify and neutralize cyber threats. ML advancements autonomously update cybersecurity vulnerabilities and protocols, reducing reliance on manual updates. Finally, we may see smart security contracts based on blockchain technology between our machine-driven systems to reduce centralized attack vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
I expect 2024 to bring the birth of the immersive internet and introduce new ways to make us productive and efficient. As you assess these trends, be deliberate and rapidly move forward on the innovations that power the transformation most pertinent to your business and personal success.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
