2023 was the year in which artificial intelligence (AI) stole the limelight in the tech world, with stories breaking almost daily on its latest advancements and ways organisations from industries of all shapes and sizes plan to make use of it.

Questions also continued to proliferate over how the AI and its development could be responsibly managed, a matter which culminated with the European Union introducing the ‘AI Act’ and even Pope Francis calling for global regulation of the tech.

As we head into the new year, the editorial team at National Technology News spoke with a range of experts to hear their predictions on what developments we can expect to witness in 2024.

Negative impacts of GenAI will be difficult to manage as mainstream adoption continues

As the rise of GenAI continues in 2024, the team Sridhar Ramaswamy at cloud computing company Snowflake believe its negative impacts will be hard to manage early on.

“Although GenAI is reimagining how we interact with machines, there are some immediate concerns that will be particularly challenging in the early years of widespread AI and language model adoption,” says Ramaswamy, senior vice president of AI at Snowflake. “For a lot of people involved in what we loosely call ‘knowledge work’, quite a few of their jobs are going to vaporise.”

Ramaswamy also predicts that advances in AI will exacerbate the digital divide and further increase global inequality.

“I can only hope that by making information more accessible, this emerging technology leads to a new generation of young adults who better understand the issues and potential, and can counter that risk,” he says.

Rise of GenAI will result in security adaptations while continuous threat exposure management will lead to more consolidation

To combat the potential threats posed by GenAI advancement, the team at IT security company Interity360 predict several key adaptions to threat management.

Brian Martin, director of product management at Integrity360 expects continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) to become mainstream in 2024.

“CTEM will enable organisations to be more proactive about identifying and assessing key problem areas in the attack surface that has grown substantially in the last couple of years,” he says. “However, this will extend beyond simply identifying and addressing vulnerabilities, enabling organisations to alter their posture, looking at users, security controls and other key pieces of the puzzle needed to change to ensure best practices are embraced.”

Martin goes on to state that a more widespread embrace of CTEM will likely also accelerate the convergence of key security tools.

He notes that when threat exposure management is under discussion, the conversation spans different products and capabilities including external attack surface management, cyber asset management, attack path management, digital risk protection, vulnerability assessment and management.

“Currently, these are all separate products – something that’s likely to change in the year ahead,” he says. “Consolidation is going to be a theme for 2024, as previously standalone products continue to become features of broader overarching solutions, such as CTEM programmes.”

VR and metaverse improvements and announcements to ramp up in 2024, but use cases still limited

Meta launched its Meta Quest 3 VR headset to general acclaim in October despite previously announcing $7.7 billion of losses in the half year period of 2023 at its VR arm Reality Labs.

Meanwhile, a report by market intelligence firm International Data Corporation found that the overall AR/VR headset market declined by 54.4 per cent year over year in the first quarter of 2023.

These factors do not suggest a particularly encouraging future for VR and its related applications, despite Apple’s eagerly awaited entry into the market with the $3,499 Vision Pro, expected in the first quarter of the year.

Philippe Guillotel, distinguished scientist at technology research and development company InterDigital acknowledges that current technology has not been able to deliver on early hype levels, leading to lacklustre adoption across both consumer and industry sectors.

However, Guillotel predicts that in 2024 we will be poised to enter the “slope of enlightenment” – a term coined in Gartner’s Hype Cycle Research Methodology in which we will begin to see improvements and new announcements for VR and metaverse technologies every year.

“Interoperability – the idea that you can take objects from one place to another in virtual reality and guarantee property rights – will be a key here, meaning that standards ensuring interoperability will be needed to enable users to move, along with their accessories, properties, capabilities, and goods,” he says.

He continues: “We also need to address immersion and the overall quality of experience. This means not only more realism (higher picture quality), but more interactivity and more usage of human senses.”

Guillotel however does not believe new use cases for VR will begin to emerge as we move into 2024.

“We need to get VR right before moving forward, which is why we’ll see a big push for improving the user experience,” he says. “We are still constrained by limitations of comfort and fatigue, which is why the main focus from a device perspective will be making them smaller and more user friendly.”

GenAI to become more accessible to business teams, with use cases rising exponentially

It is perhaps unsurprising, given the explosive emergence of the technology that GenAI continues to feature heavily in our experts’ predictions for 2024.

Acknowledging that GenAI will remain “all the rage” in 2024, Chris Stephenson, chief technology officer at independent UK consultancy Sagacity predicts a key emergent difference will be the move from ‘all talk’ to an explosion of real use cases for the technology.

“This will be due to the increasing number of turnkey solutions that leverage large language models (LLMs) to make GenAI more accessible to teams across all levels of businesses,” he explains. “Initially we will see more AI-assisted customer service, but this will quickly follow into a general enhancement of user experience capabilities within digital applications, like conversational search functions or digital assistants.”

Stephenson foresees these developments resulting in businesses also looking to capitalise on GenAI to support their internal operations and to augment employee knowledge by using LLMs to share and disseminate information within companies more effectively.

“Despite this wide-scale implementation, AI will still only complement humans – we won’t be seeing large scale lay-offs due to jobs being directly replaced by AI in 2024, or anytime soon,” he says.

5G network maturation will see surge in Internet of Things (IoT) applications

5G really hit the mainstream in 2020 with the launch of the Apple iPhone 12, but the technology is far from outstripping 4G for prominence from an infrastructure perspective.

Hitesh Morar, chief product officer at Tecnotree predicts the maturity of 5G networks will reach a turning point for the telecommunications industry in 2024 as many providers begin to focus their efforts on key use cases that can drive the monetisation of the network.

“Whilst increasing consumption of data on the network continues to fuel the need to increase throughputs and drive lower latencies at a lower cost per bit, the focus on the transition of the 5G ecosystem will focus on key B2B industries spanning mining, manufacturing and healthcare,” he says. “These industries are set to harness the potential of IoT, facilitating smarter operations and paving the way for enhanced connectivity and data-driven decision-making."

Morar goes on to state his belief that the increasing number of initiatives around 5G private networks in improving efficiency, enabling new technologies, and staying competitive in an increasingly digitised world is seen as core to these adjacent industries.

“As the technology continues to mature, more sectors are likely to explore and adopt 5G private networks to meet their specific connectivity and communication needs,” he says.

In line with the maturation of 5G networks, IoT opportunities will abound and continue to redefine the telecommunications landscape throughout 2024.

“With 5G and edge computing, we are expecting to see a surge in IoT applications in 2024,” Morar says.

“IoT's potential to interconnect devices, from smart homes to industrial machinery is creating vast opportunities and with AI taking centre stage in driving intelligence in many processes and decision making, we are expecting to see an unprecedented surge in this area.”

---