2023 was a year in which artificial intelligence (AI) and automation ushered in a new economic era, revolutionizing the way companies interact with customers. This next wave of generative AI will be more revolutionary than any technological innovation that has occurred before.
While we cannot predict all that is expected in 2024, it is clear that companies need a digital strategy that increases productivity and promotes efficiency. In addition, to have a vision towards the future, to keep pace as all industries evolve to meet the growing expectations of customers and employees.
With this in mind, Salesforce presents five ways AI will transform businesses by 2024:
1. Generative artificial intelligence shall be operational for use throughout the enterprise
AI will eventually affect every department and work team. Another breakthrough will occur when large language models (LLMs) are used not only for content generation and analysis, but also for decision making and workflow automation.
By recognizing repetitive tasks and leveraging data integrations to make informed predictions and generate automations, AI will be able to identify routine work patterns and allow people to spend their time on more rewarding work, productive and profitable.
While fundamental LLMs will be the backbone of generative AI, companies will also start using a combination of smaller, domain-specific language models for cost, performance, and latency reasons.
2. AI will transform workspaces into smarter places
According to a Salesforce study, people estimate that generative AI will save them up to five hours of work a week. This represents a new and exciting opportunity for companies: to take advantage of the creativity, strategic thinking and innovation of their teams as never before.
Chatbots and virtual assistants will simplify the employee experience by automatically reserving the right space for a team’s needs. It will also provide quick responses to queries, guide employees to resources and facilitate service requests.
Similarly, companies will transform their way of measuring performance and productivity to focus on outcomes, such as products launched or potential customers generated, rather than inputs. To do this, managers will have to change their mindset from measuring the process to measuring impact.
3. Semantic search will be essential for AI, transforming customer service
It is basically a question written in a “human” language that is then translated into the machine language. Businesses can offer a fast, meaningful, hyper-personalized service with AI using text, images, videos, and audio for search. This opens the way to a more intuitive and responsive digital economy, which will benefit both businesses and end users.
As AI becomes more adept at extracting information from structured and unstructured datasets, an increase in firms adopting semantic query capabilities can be anticipated with the fusion of structured data, as sales figures and customer demographics; and unstructured, such as blogs, customer reviews and social media comments.
4. Data harmonisation will be a key priority for business leaders
All this is only possible when AI is fed with accurate and complete data. However, trust in the quality of an organization’s data is difficult to achieve, especially among business stakeholders. So in 2024, the democratization of data and analysis will take a new turn, as they will be more proactive, automatically identify anomalies in the underlying business data, provide information in natural language and give users the possibility to ask questions and get answers quickly, without the need for a data analyst.
In addition to investing in technical solutions to harmonize disparate data sources and reduce the severity of data, teams are increasingly paying attention to defining data governance protocols and cultivating strong data cultures among their multifunctional teams.
5. The AI revolution is also a confidence revolution
Some people are concerned about ethics in the use of artificial intelligence by companies. While this concern may make business leaders hesitant to adopt generative AI, A recent Salesforce study identified some simple steps companies can take to maintain or strengthen customer confidence without slowing innovation.
For example, 57% of customers say they would trust an organization that demonstrates how it uses artificial intelligence, and 52% would feel more comfortable if the results were validated by humans.
Given the speed of adoption by companies, the use of generative AI itself may soon become a bet rather than a competitive advantage. But the open, ethical and transparent use of generative AI can be what sets companies apart in the minds of customers.
