2024 Predictions and Priorities
1. AI Will Provide Significant Competitive Advantage
Gen- AI Will Provide Significant Competitive Advantage and become a trusted resource. Gen-AI Agents Will Emerge as Unexpected Allies. Gen-AI Will Make People More Valuable, Not Less. Gen-AI Will Transform Transformation. SAI6-LCoE will help you focus on efforts to build Gen- AI capabilities
This might be obvious, but AI will continue to be a game changer to those who use it strategically. In the new year, many organizations will go live with new implementations. We don’t want to be the ones to ourselves, “How do they do that?!”
- Over 40 percent of 80 CIOs and other IT leaders surveyed in 4Q-23 said they aren’t using AI. But 2024 is the year to get down and do it with Gen-AI.
- Focus on strategic efforts to build AI capabilities. Don’t create a huge list of individual use cases. What is most essential? Recognize the patterns of capabilities you need to develop and look for ways to accumulate them. A great place to start would be with a private, generative AI tool on a private server, like in GCP, Azure, or AWS. It’s safer than using the external versions.
2. Gen-AI Will Become The Trusted Resource
2024 will enable us to learn more about what AI can do and respect what it can’t.
The new year will encourage a value shift because soon “made by AI”–-or at least “assisted by AI”–-may prove to be better than what we can make as humans alone.
This is not to discredit the work of humans without AI. By and large, when it comes to knowledge work inside of organizations, “built with AI”—in full transparency—will be a marker of excellence and trust.
Define “responsible AI”—and build it in from the beginning—to create trust. This applies both internally to employees and externally to customers and partners. This could look like: Gen-AI literacy and training Clear and updated policies around cyber, legal, privacy, and data use Transparency on when AI is being used and with what data
3. Gen-AI Agents Will Emerge as Strong Allies
Gen-AI agents will soon be positioned as co-pilots that can take on more and more as we learn to use and trust them. (If you’d like to learn more about AI agents, check out Bill Gates’s article, published earlier this year.)
Identify where you can offload work to AI agents. Incorporate AI agents into your workflow by using them to do research, and use them to write and send emails with the help of an email client, whose knowledge base includes all of my emails from the past few years. Put in a couple of ideas, and it generates an email from me in my voice. It gets better with each use.
4. AI Will Make People Much More Valuable
There's a lot of concern about AI taking away jobs. This is absolutely understandable, mainly because specific tasks will not exist (or will exist in smaller numbers) in a year. But it doesn't necessarily mean that those people go away.
As AI enters the workplace, we'll see an automatization of routine. This will free people up to focus on higher-value work that they—as knowledge workers—want to be able to do! The democratization of generative AI allows workers to leverage critical thinking: They now have access to information and insights that were once held only by an inner sanctum of analysts.
Be committed to your people. Address the distrust that they have about AI taking away their jobs, and be honest about what and how their jobs will change. Emphasize your commitment to them as valuable members of the organization.
Let knowledge workers redefine their tasks.Instead of trying to control AI centrally, make the tools widely available. Facilitate AI training so that you and your teams have confidence that they use AI safely and responsibly. Let your workers figure it out themselves. Give your people agency and trust that they can use it correctly. This will unleash the generative power of AI and will drive both strategic changes and huge transformation.
Make every knowledge worker a transformation leader. The democratization and decentralization of technology have enormous implications. But although there’s so much to say about rights, access, and governance.
