Letter from Davos 2024

by Georgios Sakellariou , AI Strategy Director at Emrys Group

As the snow settles following the gathering of thousands of entrepreneurs, business leaders and government officials in the otherwise quiet and picturesque mountain resort of Davos in Switzerland, one cannot but wonder what practical steps could be taken to realise this year’s ambition of rebuilding trust at a global scale. Beyond calls for global convergence in the context of conflict avoidance, will AI maintain its current position and take centre stage next year as well, and will trust in AI itself emerge more explicitly as the theme of next year’s summit? Here are my five takeaways from this year’s Davos summit on how discourse on AI could evolve:

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1. There is no indication of a slowing down to the AI momentum and 2024 can offer sufficient distance from the initial Generative AI excitement of yesteryear to allow for further refinement and maturity.
2. Implicit assumptions inherent to calls for altruistic AI need to be further processed and matured; limitations should be explained more effectively to non-technical audiences to accelerate meaningful identification of use cases.
3. ESG, only just recently a top conversation topic at recent summits, needs to be incorporated into AI strategies given the rising popularity and associated energy consumption of these technologies.
4. A new wave of capability is in the making, with multimodal AI promising new opportunities for multichannel experiences; attempts at regulation or adoption should consider this natural evolution in the short to medium term.
5. Muti-disciplinary approaches can be incredibly powerful. The long-term implications and dilemmas of increasingly including AI in our societies should be articulated in succinct ways, building on impactful aphorisms that captured the anxieties of the internet generation.?

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All of the points above (and perhaps more) will be critical ahead of any potential transition of AI into a consistently reliable solution to high-stakes business challenges. At Emrys, we are continuously exploring links between emerging AI, IoT & Industry 4.0 capabilities and opportunities for sustainable growth.