KM and AI: Experts look at what lies ahead for 2024

AI and dreams of its potential rocked this past year as companies moved quickly to embed and offer their own version of chat assistants, predictive and generative AI, and more.

According to Jay Wolcott, CEO and co-founder of Knowbl, early adopters of Large Language Models (LLMs) for customer automation will gain a competitive advantage, he predicts, for the new year ahead.

“Technologies like LangChain, which allow users to feed the results of one LLM into another LLM, will become much more important for corporate users than the next, all-knowing LLM. Imagine using an LLM that measures the anger of a caller in a call center (furious), and that anger is fed into a follow-on model that combines the anger with the fundamental issue being addressed in the call to predict the likelihood of that caller canceling their service, or buying a competing product,” said Jeff Catlin, EVP of AI products at InMoment.

Combinational AI is the next big step for corporate AI, be it in customer support, buyer purchase behavior or any other fundamental business problem, Catlin noted.

The biggest concerns about AI range from the spread of misinformation to the unpredictable nature of maintaining privacy and security. Ashok Srivastava, senior vice president and chief data officer, intuit, believes LLMs will assist generative AI to reason more and hallucinate less.

“AI is moving beyond the LLM text world of ChatGPT and the landscapes of Midjourney to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), systems that can reason across different media types. This is opening up new types of applications and possibilities, such as image-based inventory or virtual product support assistants for small businesses and may help to ground future AI systems on more real-world examples that mitigate the potential of hallucination. We expect many more applications over the next 12 months, and as generative AI learns with sound, vision, and other senses, the near future may bring with it AI systems that can distinguish between reality and fiction,” Srivastava said.

Chelsea Alves, a consultant at UNmiss, shared her thoughts on the limitations AI presents in terms of social media marketing, “While AI presents immense opportunities, it's not without concerns. Issues like copyright infringement, duplicate content, false facts, and misinformation will continue to rise in 2024. However, I predict content creation will experience the biggest evolution in 2024 thanks to the power of AI. Social media marketers should continue to test AI tools daily to fully understand not just its limitations, but how it can revolutionize social media strategy.”

Brian Land, VP global sales engineering at Lucidworks, thinks that the usage of AI will usher in dynamic personalization and real-time data that creates the hybrid customer journey.

“Retailers are doing some pretty innovative things with real-time data and AI. They're making online shopping feel more like shopping in a real store. With all these new technical capabilities, they're getting better at talking to consumers personally. For example, when a shopper leaves items in their cart, brands won't forget about them. They'll send them emails that are tailored just for them. It's like having a helpful guide showing you around a store, but online,” Land said.

More and more retailers are embracing generative AI, aiming to make the consumer shopping experience better, explained Melissa Hill, VP of products at Lucidworks.

“They're stepping up by improving how they search for things online. Shoppers will notice more personalized prompts, better-organized search results, and suggestions made just for them. It's all about taking personalization to a whole new level," Hill said.

The most crucial AI trend in 2024 will be the rise in utilizing AI to gather contextual information, which will enable organizations to better understand their environment and gain a leg up amid unpredictable markets, supply chain challenges, and talent management issues, according to Jeff Moloughney, CMO, Digital.ai.

“Organizations, drowning in dashboards, will leverage natural language processing to unlock and transform data into actionable insights, empowering leaders to predict risks, manage costs, and enhance operational effectiveness,” said Moloughney.

Paul Barba, Chief Scientist at InMoment, believes OpenAI drama will continue to fill 2024. The ouster and rehiring of Sam Altman to OpenAI created news cycles jam-packed with gossip and hot takes, and Barba suspects OpenAI stories will continue to fill headlines all next year.

“The underlying catalysts—the unique non-profit/for-profit hybrid structure, the massive costs, the risks and promises of AI—haven’t changed, and with the speed this field has been advancing, there’s ample opportunity for these forces to come to a head again and again next year,” Barba said.

Catlin predicts ChatGPT will no longer be the prevailing technology for the enterprise by 2025.

“Like most first movers in technology, ChatGPT will become less and less relevant as the year progresses. Local LLMs like Llama2 (and whatever comes next) will become the engine of corporate AI. There are many reasons for this, but data security and the ability to influence the results by augmenting a local LLM with industry-specific content are likely to be the two that drive this change,” Catlin said.