TOP 6 PREDICTIONS IN TECHNOLOGY FOR 2024.

This writer has always been fascinated by technology. It is perhaps one of the top 5 careers that need constant upskilling because it is a job that moves at a breakneck pace.

Every year, the landscape of technology is different, and it’s our job to keep on top of it. This article covers the emerging trends that will shape the global landscape over the next year, and what you can expect.

There will be a more mature offering of AI products and services and the emergence of AI market leaders.

Since ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 , every tech company has been in a mad rush to integrate AI into their products or offer it themselves. Now that people have had over a year to catch up, expect a flood of highly competitive AI offerings. Last year Google launched Bard and that was just the tip of the iceberg. This year will see lots more. We’re already starting to see it in the cloud space (Azure and AWS are going head to head on AI), but in 2024 this will extend to every conceivable field because AI can benefit customers in pretty much every industry.

Also, there will be a lot of fierce competition in 2024 as we start to get a clearer idea of who is going to wind up with market share for AI-related products and services in 2025 and beyond. Once we get to that point, it will be more difficult for newcomers to come in and compete with these more mature offerings.

There will be a chatbot in nearly everything.

If 2023 was the “we are getting there” moment, 2024 will be the year of “Do you want a chatbot with that?” This is because the lowest-hanging fruit for businesses will be conversational chatbots and virtualized assistants. They’re the most obvious application to help with customer service, and they’re easy to implement with tools like Azure AI Bot Service(Yes, this writer has been reading a lot on Azure). Technologists who are under pressure to “start using AI” will likely start here and expand outwards.

For consumers, this means you’ll start seeing chatbots pop up in everything in 2024, perhaps to the point you even get sick of them!

Work will be more abstracted, with lower and no-code options.

In 2023, AI was being used to abstract away tactical parts of people’s roles, and there will be a whole service offering around this in 2024 onward. You’ve got AI-powered coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, and Tabnine. Tools like Amazon Q can provide architectural advice for your workloads.?

Even making AI can be no code , with options like Azure Machine Learning Studio, which is pretty much drag and drop. We’ll see more low and no-code services and more AI assistants for every conceivable task. In 2024, all of this will cascade into abstracting away work for non-technical roles, such as customer service, graphic design, finance, teaching, and more.

Organizations will suddenly be desperate to clean data.

Expect this sentence in 2024: “We need to clean our business data.” Rather than it being a matter of data hygiene, this will be a matter of critical importance since companies will be trying to get business insights from data using AI, and the insights will be only as good as the data you’ve got on hand.

On a low level, businesses will be inputting business data into tools like ChatGPT and processing it for quick insights with data analysis. On a bigger scale, organizations will be using tools like Amazon Q to get sophisticated insights across all their business data. Again, someone’s going to have to clean it up!

There will be more code translators and wider language support.

Ever swore about having to update the version of your code to a newer version, or wanted to switch it to a new language entirely? AI is going to be a big help here. For example, Amazon Q can upgrade Java 8 and Java 11 code to Java 17 code . In 2024, we’ll see more support for a greater spectrum of languages, not just obvious ones like Python.

Human intelligence will become vital for organizations and Businesses will remember that the cloud exists.

As organizations try and capitalize on AI in 2024, they’ll need people who can use it.

Artificial intelligence, like any technology, still relies on human intelligence so if you want to get the most out of AI, you need people with the skills to leverage that technology and who have the other skills you need important to your business.

It's those people who will understand the benefits that AI can bring to their functions, and ultimately unlock them for your organization… It’s human intelligence that will use AI to differentiate your organization, drive the real use cases of today, and uncover the transformative business applications of tomorrow.

With all the excitement about AI (though largely justified), organizations will remember that cloud computing services are still as essential to drive customer value in 2024 as they were in 2020.

These are largely predictions that this writer feels might come true. Do you have your predictions for 2024? Kindly drop them as a comment below. For more predictions like this for 2024, read more here.

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