Predictions 2024

Curated prediction snippets from the world of tech, startups, and venture capital.

Below are my top takeaways/highlights from every prediction article I have read recently.

Predictions are divided into two sections - (A) Tech predictions (focused broadly on the tech sector with a probable impact on all companies, not just startups) and (B) Startup and venture predictions (focused on the startup ecosystem).

Section A - Tech Predictions

Bloomberg - "Tech We’re Looking Forward To in 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• Smarter voice assistants: Since ChatGPT drastically raised expectations for AI, Alexa and Siri seem dumb by comparison....But after Amazon recently showed off an upgrade for Echo devices that will give them ChatGPT-like capabilities and Bloomberg reporting indicating Apple is developing generative AI, I can't wait to start talking to both again in the coming year. —Austin Carr
• AI gadgets: I’m looking forward to AI that actually does something to get me and other electronics obsessives feeling like we need a new gadget...The PC industry is already telling me I need an “AI PC,” and I've seen demos. It’s mostly just marketing. I'll need to see a lot more before the credit card comes out. —Ian King

Deloitte Insights - "TMT Predictions 2024" (Link to the predictions)

• Gen AI chip demand fans a semi tailwind … for now: The generative AI chip market is growing fast, and together with other AI-enabling chips could represent half of the value of all semiconductors sold by 2027, but probably won’t.
• Signals from space: Direct-to-device satellite phone connectivity boosts coverage: Integrating satellite and terrestrial mobile networks could unlock new revenue for the satellite, semiconductor, and telecom industries.
• A raw deal: Will materials shortages, supply chain challenges threaten tech's future? In the face of rising trade issues and skyrocketing demand, e-waste recycling and digital supply networks and a holistic approach to supply chain sustainability could help in the medium term.
• Back from the debt: Venture debt funding could grow again after a sudden decline. After a rough 2023, tech companies should expect to see a rebound in venture debt funding.

LinkedIn News - “34 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2024” (Link to the prediction)

• We'll see the quiet rise of "back-door remote" jobs: the number of “back-door remote” jobs will discreetly multiply. For jobs that can be done remotely, companies that are technically hybrid or in-person will quietly allow remote work for the right candidate — or high-performing employee.
• ChatGPT's hype will fade, as a new generation of tailor-made bots rises up: Meta is betting big on the narrow by introducing 28 different special-purpose bots instead of one ChatGPT competitor. There’s Coco (for dancing), Max (for cooking), Victor (for training) and plenty more. These characters might soon speak — with voices — and take on discrete personalities. It’s a step forward from bots like ChatGPT, Alexa and Siri, whose quest to do everything makes them feel like nothing. Open-source AI — the hottest movement in tech — will also push narrow use cases forward. Companies building with specialized, open-source models will deliver performance on par with the big bots using far fewer resources. As the technology goes, so do the applications.
• The rubber will meet the road for autonomous vehicles: Now, 2024 is shaping into a make or break year for driverless vehicles. Companies that were hurtling towards expansion are watching the fallout from Cruise’s issues with alarm. This past year, the theoretical turned visceral as driverless vehicles from companies like Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise became a highly visible presence in cities such as San Francisco and Phoenix.
• An IPO boom will come for companies, whether they're ready to go public or not: What will make 2024 the year of the IPO? Necessity — startups are running out of money.

Amazon's CTO Werner Vogel - "Tech Predictions for 2024 and Beyond" (Link to the prediction)

• Generative AI becomes culturally aware: Large language models (LLMs) trained on culturally diverse data will gain a more nuanced understanding of human experience and complex societal challenges. This cultural fluency promises to make generative AI more accessible to users worldwide.
• AI assistants redefine developer productivity: AI assistants will evolve from basic code generators into teachers and tireless collaborators that provide support throughout the software development lifecycle. They will explain complex systems in simple language, suggest targeted improvements, and take on repetitive tasks, allowing developers to focus on the parts of their work that have the most impact.

GP Bullhound - "Ten trends to drive technology in 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• Prediction 4: The rise of authenticity as creators challenge AI: Tools that obstruct AI from training off human-created content will surge next year as 2024 is geared to become a battleground between AI-generated and human-created content
• Prediction 7: Anti-money laundering and payment protections come centre-stage: The number of regulatory compliance platforms is increasing as illicit wallets send c.20% of funds through DeFi, with the AML market, driven by digital transactions, poised to grow at a CAGR of 16% between 2023 and 2030

Gartner- "Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• AI-Augmented Development: By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023. AI-augmented development tools integrate with an engineer’s development environment to produce application code, translate legacy code to modern languages, enable design-to-code transformation and enhance application testing capabilities
• Buyers With Byte(s): Machine Customers: By 2028, 15 billion connected products will exist with the potential to behave as customers, with billions more to follow in the coming years. They will impact trillions of dollars in purchases by 2030 and eventually become more significant than the arrival of digital commerce.

Harvard Business Review - "The Year in Tech, 2024" (Link to the eBook)

• Leveraging new tech to bring supply chains closer to home: The location of low-cost labor largely shaped today’s global supply chains, but that has changed dramatically over the past ve years. Technology is nally ready to replace human labor across a broad range of supply chain activities, which will give companies more opportunities to operate where they choose and reduce their dependence on Asia.
• The metaverse will enhance - not replace - companys' physical location: Wave after wave of technological innovation—the telegraph, the streetcar, the telephone, the car, the airplane, the internet, and more—have brought predictions of the demise of physical location and the death of cities. Time and time again, such prognostications have been proven wrong. And while the pandemic has changed where and how people work, the trend of talented people, innovation, and economic activity becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer and larger superstar locations has consistently proven durable. Cities aren’t going anywhere. Still, the metaverse feels different.

John Chambers - "My Economic, Business, and Tech Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• First, the “Decade of AI” truly begins. AI will be the most fundamental tech change ever, greater than the internet and cloud combined. Companies will struggle with sustainable AI differentiation. AI will accelerate overall tech regulation and compliance needs – especially for Big Tech. I anticipate legislation to be in place by next year’s end.
• The proliferation of the good and bad AI will be evident from increased cybersecurity challenges. Among the many cyber threats, deep fakes will be the number one issue for individuals, companies, and governments, particularly as we think about the upcoming U.S. Presidential election.

Platformer - "14 predictions about 2024"?from Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer (Link to the prediction)?

• The quality of search results degrades as Google proves unable to reliably detect AI-generated content. In 2024, AI-produced dreck will find its way into nearly every corner of the internet. While most of it will be inoffensive and generally correct, it will get enough wrong — and cause enough frustration among those it misleads — that trust in search will decline.
• The number of people who say they are in romantic relationships with AI companions will increase sharply. We have a national loneliness epidemic. For some people, their primary experience of most of their friends and family is already digital, with text messages and the occasional phone call making up the majority of their interactions. Into this equation add chatbots with longer memories

The Daily Upside - “What to Expect From Tech in 2024” (Link to the prediction)

• Sara Geoghegan, Counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center: I expect to see more people wanting to protect their privacy. From the explosive growth of generative AI, to the threat of surveillance of abortion access and reproductive privacy, to the constant annoyance of the ubiquity of hyper targeted ads, data breaches, and spam calls. Privacy has become a kitchen table topic.

Fred Swaniker - "My Top 10 Technology Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• More companies will begin leveraging “Industrial AI” to address Climate Change: With increasing pressure from regulators, activists, shareholders, and customers, many organizations will look to industrial AI to track and optimize their carbon footprint in 2024.
• AI Trust, Risk & Security Management (AI TRiSM) will become an area of focus: Organizations need AI TriSM controls to reduce biases in decision making, increase the accuracy of AI predictions, promote greater fairness, and prevent copyright violations, especially with generative AI. AI regulation will put pressure on AI model explainability, while AI model builders will struggle to explain how their increasingly large language models work.

Brian Evergreen - "5 Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• Microsoft wins the "AI Middlegame": The Generative AI race we've witnessed in 2023 between OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, etc. was only the opening. Where OpenAI is building a suite of products, à la the Adobe or M365 Suite, Microsoft has the legal frameworks, enterprise footprint, technical platforms, thought leadership, and partner ecosystem to support organizations in creating a comprehensive vision and transformational strategy.
• A new era of Expertise and Trust (A move away from the Attention economy): As we move into 2024, similar to how we got wiser about search engines, people are becoming increasingly discerning, curating the experts and thought leaders they listen to and read based on the depth and applicability of their expertise rather than how many likes or followers they have.

Bernard Marr - "The Top 5 Tech Trends In 2024 Everyone Must Be Ready For" (Link to the prediction)

• Cyber Resilience: Cyber resilience goes beyond cyber security, though, as it also encapsulates measures that can be taken to recover and ensure continuity when defenses are breached or due to circumstances beyond our control.

Fabio Moioli - "AI: three predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• Prediction 1: Beyond Human Language: The Dawn of AI Worlds Models: 2024, moves us from the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs) to an era dominated by what I propose to call "Worlds Models". This shift is more than a mere linguistic update; it represents a profound conceptual revolution, signaling AI's progression into a more integrated and globally nuanced era. Worlds Models will not just be adept at processing a variety of data inputs – they transcend traditional boundaries.
• Prediction 3: The Year of Deep Fakes: The tools required for creating deep fakes are becoming increasingly available and affordable. Generative AI, which is highly effective in this domain, is a key factor. The real advancements in 2024, however, are expected in the realms of audio and video. Voice cloning technologies, like those from many start-up companies, have reached a point where they can replicate voices with astonishing precision. This advancement threatens the reliability of voice-based security measures and voice mails.

Forbes - "2024 Energy Predictions"?(Link to the prediction)

• Investment in carbon utilization fuels emissions reductions: In 2024, we expect a surge in carbon utilization-related investment, which is carbon dioxide (CO2) captured and upcycled into other products, rather than released into the atmosphere. There is growing recognition that carbon isn’t the enemy — wasted carbon is. Carbon Transformation and other utilization approaches are critical to reducing emissions from hard-to-abate industries and can transform everyday products into carbon sinks.

Ed Sim - "Enterprise Tech" (Link to the prediction)

• AI evolves from narrow tasks like writing text to enterprise workflow and automation - we are in the beginning phases with agent technology showing what’s possible, but it’s clear to me that these enterprise workflows, say in a ten-step process, may include using several different models from OpenAI to open source, multiple modalities from text to image processing, and will include human-in-the-loop for ???? or ???? to further refine these models.
• AI evolves from proactive chat to seamless suggestions - if last year was the year of chat as the logical interface for using GenAI models, this year will be the year of seamless AI assistance as applications evolve and provide new ways to interact with AI like Superhuman’s embedded 1 line summary format in emails.

Section B - Startup and venture predictions

TechCrunch - "More than 40 investors share their top predictions for 2024"

• Jai Das, president, partner and co-founder, Sapphire Ventures: We will see many more recapitalizations and down-rounds in 2024. Startups that have inefficient business models and lack investors willing to support them will shut down or be sold for pennies on the dollar. Lots of seed-stage companies will also have a hard time raising Series A since investors at that stage have become much more selective.
• Sailesh Ramakrishnan, managing partner and co-founder, Rocketship VC: We’ll see the reckoning of first-wave generative AI next year. The companies that raised money at inflated valuations but only had ideas and no real revenue or business model will pivot and try to find a business.
• Kirby Winfield, founding general partner, Ascend: Increased focus on “SaaS 3.0”: Applied AI with proprietary models and no reliance on OpenAI et al., where novel tech allows for reimagined approaches to vertical industry problems unsolved by incumbents.

Bain Capital Ventures - "Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

Business Insider - "2024 tech trends to watch" (Link to the prediction)

• The IPO market will stay quiet: "With high-profile tech IPOs now trading at low multiples, companies aren't eager to go public in early 2024, and most won't risk doing so in the middle of an election cycle," Jai Das said. He's betting the window reopens in 2025.
• Startups will shut down en masse: The sparse flow of funding of late spells doom for certain startups, investors said. They told us to expect a lot of companies to run out of money and fail in the new year. "The band-aids applied to keep companies alive will mostly not hold until the end of 2024," said Chuckie Reddy, a partner and head of growth at QED Investors.

VentureBeat - "AI predictions for 2024: What top VCs think" (Link to the article)

• Chris Kauffman, Partner at General Catalyst - “Long-term AI shift" : Everyone who jumped into AI this past year will exit 2024 knowing what chiplets are. As we continue to grapple with the limits of Moore’s Law, we will also see new architectural paradigms come into play — not only with new core semiconductor architectures like chiplets, but also with advanced packaging and interconnect.
• Jéssica Le?o Partner at Decibel VC - "GPUs - The Rich Will Buy, The Rest of Us Will Rent" - A contrarian take is we will eventually not have a GPU shortage. The market will converge to a small handful of buyers and suppliers. Nvidia and others will scale up to meet forecasted demand, and Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many sovereign nations will still be large buyers. The rest of us will rent them from the cloud providers but there will be plenty of leasable capacity to go around. The rich will get richer, but quality of life will improve for the “GPU-poor”.
• Masha Bucher, Founder and General Partner at Day One Ventures - "The rise and fall of generative AI startups": Many generative AI companies will die. If you weren’t one of the startups that raised monster rounds this year, the future will be uncertain for you. Many [generative AI] companies will compete with each other, startups built on top of OpenAI will experience platform risk, and fundraising into these companies will dry out.

Nikhil Basu Trivedi - "The next big thing in 2024 will be...?" (Link to the predictions)

• Too many good gems to post here. Go read the entire article. My two fav are below.
• Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz - The next?big thing in 2024 will be voice-first AI applications. Voice will be a new emerging way to interact with technology and the heart of a new set of productivity apps.?LLMs can deliver voice-first productivity at a level far beyond Siri + other legacy agents. This will give every person an assistant on-call (literally). Audio allows for more natural and higher fidelity interactions, and tools built on this will become integral to our lives.
• Hunter Walk, Co-Founder & Partner at Homebrew - The next big thing in 2024 will be the reappearance of small (sub $1b market cap) IPOs. While most of the attention will be on Stripe and SHEIN behemoths, we'll start to see some small cap listings of tech companies that are profitable/near profitable and looking for liquidity options outside of M&A or secondary sales. These may take the shape of direct listings in some cases, and come with extended insider/investor lockups in order to manage float and volatility, but IPO will rightfully be put back on the table for software?companies who don't want to, or can't, manufacture buyouts.??

PitchBook - "2024 Enterprise Technology Outlook" (Link to the prediction)

• Infrastructure SaaS: Infrastructure investment will be driven higher by data software & systems, as enterprises seek to capture and monetize their data like never before..... One of the few certainties is that proprietary information captured within each firm, as well as their own unique client interactions, will be critical to developing insightful and impactful AI solutions in the coming years. Importantly, we are seeing accelerated investment in our subsegments of data management software and database management systems. I
• Enterprise SaaS: Enterprise vendors will employ recent AI & ML breakthroughs to develop more mature and impactful solutions beyond the initial rush of early solutions.... The hype cycle is in full swing, with nearly every enterprise software vendor, from nascent startups to massive public companies, seeking to implement AI capabilities to new and existing enterprise software offerings. Although we do not anticipate the majority of these to pan out, we believe AI & ML capacities will be the new table stakes across all of our enterprise SaaS segments.

Janelle Teng - "SaaSy Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• LMMs are the new LLMs: Multimodality becomes table-stakes: As OpenAI states in GPT-4V’s system card: “Incorporating additional modalities (such as image inputs) into LLMs is viewed by some as a key frontier in AI research and development.” We’ve just arrived at this exciting frontier as 2023 saw huge strides made in model capabilities extending beyond text to become multimodal systems.
• Domain-specific AI powering a new crop of vertical SaaS: Just as the shift to the cloud energized the Vertical SaaS movement over a decade ago, I foresee the AI platform shift being a powerful catalyst to reinvigorate the Vertical SaaS category.

Krishnakumar Natarajan - "Enterprise SaaS Market Outlook for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• SaaS and Hyper Scalers in the Post-Semiconductor Landscape: With the advent of new Generation AI-based software products and platforms, SaaS products and hyper scalers are positioned to benefit in the post-semiconductor era. This presents a unique opportunity for those in the tech industry to leverage the evolving landscape.
• Vertical Domain-Based LLMs: In 2024, vertical domain-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to become a reality. This development is likely to drive traction and adoption, offering startups new avenues for specialization and market penetration.

Edward Suh - "VC is a mainstream industry now" (Link to the prediction)

• Compression of low hanging alpha: Doug Leone recently described how the venture industry has morphed from a high margin artisan business to a low margin mainstream business....Some combination of extreme contrarianism, extreme specialization, and highly differentiated strategy/network, are necessary for new firms to even try to compete today.
• Increased scrutiny: the VC industry is mainstream, and by extension, the tech startup industry as a whole is mainstream now. With that come the downsides to fame that celebrities know all too well.... Regulators are also much more heavy handed nowadays with tech companies.

Jeremy Tan - "I believe 2024 brings great opportunities." (Link to the prediction)

• 6 - Startup founders will select VCs more carefully : The capital winter would have taught founders to choose investors wisely. Plenty of VCs, but very few provide true value add. Founders know this and will seek more than just capital. Expect more sector-focused VCs to fill this gap.
• 7 - VCs will need to change their criteria : Post the major implosions (e.g. WeWork), investors will wisen up to realise that the ‘unicorn’ trade is crowded and may not deliver. New markets require new approaches. Sustainability and profits continue to be attractive and demand for them will grow. Investment periods will stretch longer with smaller funding rounds.

Alan Vaksman - "Venture Capital in 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• Generational Change: 2024 marks not just a period of recovery, but a generational shift in VC. Many established "Tier 1" VCs are transitioning to "safe bet" Tier II positions, while numerous Tier II entities may vanish as new Tier I entities emerge. Venture capital slowly progresses from the "old boys' network driven by black magic” to a more akin to the systematic nature of private equity.
• Hyper-local Obsolescence: The term "hyper-local" is poised to become obsolete as investors acknowledge the slim chances of discovering the next tech unicorn in their own backyards, debunking it as a viable investment strategy.

CTVC - "2024 Climate Tech Oracle" (Link to the prediction)

• Ally Yost, Commonwealth Fusion Systems: Yes. Funds that raised in ‘21/’22 with a climate focus will have increasing pressure to deploy dry powder. But investors will be more likely to syndicate and pile in to more clear winners to reduce being perceived as too risky, resulting in more total dollars but going to a more concentrated set of companies. We'll also see more generalist VCs lean into climate tech as it becomes increasingly "the thing" - jury is out on if this will be helpful or harmful.
• Shayle Kann, Energy Impact Partners on “Will the voluntary carbon market (VCM) shrink in 2024?” - Yes. We're in for a significant reckoning in the VCM, and I expect buyers to pull back while the market sorts out what is real and what is not. In contrast, the CDR market (particularly for verifiable, durable removals) will continue to grow from a smaller base.
• Joshua Posamentier, Congruent Ventures on “Will EV sales reach 25% of global new car purchases in 2024?”??- Not in the US. Trends are slowing and will only pick up significantly when the state of the non-Tesla charging networks improves. 1/3 of Americans rent their home, making charging more challenging, and 1/3 of Americans have no garage in which to charge. Infrastructure is important.??

Anand Sanwal - "10 M&A transactions that will happen in 2024" (Link to the prediction)

Number 6 is the one people most disagree with

1. American Express acquires Airbase

2. Rippling acquires Pulley

....6. Shopify acquires Stripe

Vishal Persaud - "The venture capital funding crunch will continue in 2024, but it won't be as bad" (Link to the article)

• Marcos Fernandez, managing partner at Fiat Ventures - We anticipate that fundraising markets will open up in 2024 when compared to 2023, but it'll still be a challenging environment.
• Pegah Ebrahimi, a managing partner at FPV Ventures - Startup founders may think that the worst is over, but we're not out of the woods just yet and that isn't going to immediately change in 2024. Startup founders should still practice caution.
• Brad Svrluga, cofounder and general partner at New York-based firm Primary - Venture capital funding at the earlier stages has been ultra competitive lately due to heightened scrutiny across the industry, and it's likely going to get even more so.

Forbes - "14 Predictions For Venture Capital In 2024" (Link to the article)

• Daryn Dodson , Managing Partner, Illumen Capital - "2024 will prove to be a year of critical importance for managing bias" : With forty countries going through election cycles, we anticipate increased uncertainty in the markets and geo-political friction, which will further exacerbate bias in the field. Additionally, the proliferation of AI will require significant developments to address bias in machine learning to ensure that the industries of impact sectors are accelerating both with speed of delivery, as well as the equity for diverse populations. Fund managers will need to be especially resilient and hold true to their strategies to address bias while ensuring optimal impact and returns.”
• Jeremiah Gordon , General Counsel, CapitalG - 2024 will be a banner year for tech M&A" - 2024 will be a banner year for tech mergers and acquisitions. For startups struggling to fundraise due to high-interest rates and VC valuation caution, selling will feel like the best — and most face-saving — option. Meanwhile, public and large private tech companies will be eager to leverage their strong balance sheets and access to vast quantities of capital to acquire customers inorganically, boost adjacent product offerings and add key distribution channels and partnerships.
• Lisa Cawley, CFA , Managing Director, Screendoor - "New managers starting VC firms will increasingly be spin-outs from big firms" - In the next 12 months, I believe we’ll see a steady pace of new fund managers starting firms, and an increasing number of these managers will originate from existing brands rather than primarily operating backgrounds. I expect they’ll have a hunger and hustle that will benefit founders after years of tourist investors and create a competitive pressure on other established investors to up their game.

Tomasz Tunguz - "2024 Predictions" (Link to the predictions)

• The share of AI-enabled web searches approaches 50% of all consumer search as consumer behavior patterns evolve, especially on mobile.
• The BTC ETF drives a resurgence in interest in web3 financing. The winter forced many companies to evolve from open-source projects to revenue-generating businesses.
• The discussion around AI regulation becomes a critical topic in the US during the election because machine-generated content exacerbates international meddling in US politics.

Peter Walker from Carta - “3 predictions for 2024”

• Growth will retake profitability as the most treasured metric for venture capital (though perhaps tempered with “capital efficiency” instead of “at all costs”).

Avni Barman - "My 2024 Career Predictions for Tech and Media" (Link to the prediction)

• Layoffs will get worse! It's never too late to start that side hustle you've been contemplating and begin passively job searching to protect yourself in this economy.
• Follower count will stop mattering. It doesn't measure current relevancy or future performance. I predict that an advanced AI tool will be developed to assess the strength of a creator's brand, and will become standard across the industry. This tool will go beyond simple engagement rates, determining the extent of a creator's cult following and their effectiveness in selling different products based on the content and audience they've built.

Jonathan Chang - "Predictions for 2024" (Link to the prediction)

• The rise of boring, old & unsexy industries. We’ll see a rise of funding & deals done in spaces like agtech, proptech, construction, legal tech, and oil/gas ($10B invested into ~1000 companies last year) with the catalyst being AI.
• Livestream shopping will finally have its moment in the US in 2024. The emergence of Tik Tok shop, Whatnot, Flip and others will be the catalyst for more US consumers to adopt livestream shopping
• In Person & the remergence of hacker houses. More startups that are founded in 2024 shift to in person work & more hacker houses emerge in major cities to fuel the need for a work/live space with other like minded folk

Disclaimer: This article is solely for information purposes, and the contents should not be considered legal, tax, investment, or other advice. The contents are obtained from various sources, provided in summary form only, are not purported to be complete, and there is no guarantee of accuracy or completeness.

Unsplash reference link.

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