How will AI impact us in the next 5 yrs?

I am usually someone who writes only short posts and short articles. But there is so much happening in the world of AI, that I wanted to share some thoughts on how AI will shape up the world and what impact will we see in the next 5 yrs. More like a 2030 view on the world with AI at the epicentre.

Last week has been crazy with launches of GPT-4o, Astra, Gemini launches and the launch of Co-pilot PC by Microsoft in Ignite last night. It is a bit too much to digest to be honest, it seems like there is a common connected lobby working on AI, agents, multimodal mode of inputs etc. Since the biggest themes of all these launches by Google, MS and OpenAI was use of agents and multimodal form of inputs. OpenAI demos were really impressive where GPT-4o can serve as the ultimate personal assistant ever created, and MS playing the game it is know for, to make PC the best experience with contextual mode of input. It will be a game changer since you don't need to go to a site/app and then ask for questions, but you can get assistance right on the screen/app/browser where you are working on. Do check these links in case you have missed these demos:

MS co-pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHQgf3DNAr8

Astra launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXVvvRhiGjI

Chatgpt-4o launch: https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/

And we all know what Nvidia has been upto, so that is a story for another day. With all these AI advancements happening all around us, and of course fears of job losses looking as well, where are we headed to and how will the world (or at-least the tech side of things) look like 5-7 yrs down the line?

Broadly speaking, this is how I see things in 5 yrs down the line. There are essentially 2 themes which will emerge out of AI and related products:

#1. More efficiency and productivity: This is going to be the primary play where companies like MS, Open AI will make merry - giving tools to people to automate things, make things more smart and efficient and really usher in efficiency eg. a Teams assistant which is taking notes, summarising events, sending emails, creating following items and also following up on them.

Or a design assistant which makes it far easy to create a sketch or empowering a researcher to do secondary research in a few minutes and create a polished deck in a matter of hrs (which earlier used to take days if not weeks!)

#2. Innovation: This is the next leg, which is all about innovation. Helping people learn more things, trying different languages, creating music, creation of videos, amalgamation of new ideas, connecting people from different spheres. AI will usher in a lot of innovation as it brings more ideas to the table and gives tools to people to collaborate and create things with.

How do I see the above themes impacting different industries?

#1. Impact on services delivery: I believe this industry will be hit the hardest by AI. Imagine all your support centres, BPOs, KPOs, Operational roles, Marketing, Desk sales roles etc. They will be hit by 80% or so. The more the repetitive the role and lesser complexity it has, AI will likely replace the same. All the work on agentic workflows and creation of multi-agent workflows (with memory and iterative capabilities) will provide great accuracy for automating business use cases, where companies can just train these models using their data and most of these domain knowledge tasks will be automated.

Specially over time, there will be no code tools to setup and train these AI models eg. just upload your customer support FAQ, do a little bit of UI based tuning and the model is ready to be deployed. Further, with GPT-4o like multimodal form of inputs, you can talk to a human-like bot (AI avatar) which will solve your queries. No more banging your head with a text bot (which we all hate btw!).

The lesser the complex the role and more repetitive it is, faster AI will replace the same. There is already so much work happening on building custom Agents and slowly there will be no code tools for the same as well. The massive job loss in the services industry is merely inevitable at this stage.

#2. Impact on core tech roles:

I think there will be a significant impact on tech roles as well. Eg. there will be a pair programmer working with a developer, and basic code and test cases will be directly taken care of the by the AI assistant. You will not need PMs to write detailed PRD's for each feature or do them a lot of user research interviews, AI assistants can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Similarly, if you are a data analyst, an AI can potentially pull out all the data + draw insights to a great extent. I feel there will be a 50% cut in tech roles when AI is in full force.

So, what does the future look like with AI? I think there will be massive downscaling in non-tech roles, services industries with the advent of AI and agents. The impact on tech roles will also be there to some extent. However, there will be a lot of more opportunities, where companies will be building wrappers around LLMs and building solutions and agents for different industry use cases like travel, customer support, data insights, health monitoring and forecasting, vehicle monitoring, AR/VR, Gaming etc. Imagine a personal finance guru or a French tutor who is there with you always for just 10 USD/month? There is already so much work happening on creating plugins on CustomGPT, I can't even imagine the pace of innovation and magic which will unfold in the due course of time.

Custom ChatGPT store: https://chatgpt.com/gpts?oai-dm=1