MY BEST MATE IS AN AI.
Yearly digital trend study of innovation specialist Space and Lemon Innovations. 9th edition.
Best mate and AI, what? Yes! We at Space and Lemon Innovations love AI and believe it will be welcome, regular support in daily life, at the office, at school, in a car, and in a supermarket. Faster than expected when watching the pace of Generative AI (Gen AI) development. A huge, big second wave. AI will grow closer to everyone, closer to business, with personal and professional assistants. This is what happens in 2024, a phase of support, not replacement. However, it forces us all to new routines. A “best mate” in a way, both serious and nice.
Space and Lemon Innovations has been publishing a yearly digital trend study since its foundation in 2016. This is an excerpt of the 2024 edition.
The second wave of Gen AI.
The Large Language Model (LLM) and its one-year-old ChatGPT offspring are in an incredible dynamic. A race powered by massive funding — Amazon bets on Anthropic with $4 billion, and a German group of Bosch, SAP, and Schwarz Group (Lidl) bets $500 million on Aleph Alpha. A race like a World Cup. A world cup of Gen AI that is led by Open AI that pushes a new thing every week, a GPT-4 Turbo, a new version of Whisper (Speech), and the mind-blowing “GPTs” apps.
Every professional keeps on using LLM and reports on how magical the conversation is. They use ChatGPT, PI or Claude, and often mix them. Businesses have understood that they can build powerful use cases. For example for knowledge management, like the pioneer dmGPT for retrieving knowledge from the retailer database.
More versions, more tools, and more magic are accessible to all. The LLM players are good at tackling the next “problems”: lower prices, more inference capacities, safety along the development journey, fewer hallucinations, the same results for the same questions, copyright commitments, closed data silos, etc. The race is on, here as well. A race led by the San Francisco derby Open AI versus Anthropic. And Google “running” with Gemini.
Don’t get stuck in phase one.
The second wave is also formed by applications that are less random and sporadic. The application and the use cases will get closer and closer to business. The alignment to business is key for coming out of a “wild” phase where everyone, every department randomly develops without coordination. Often on older versions. This will end because Gen AI technology is so fast and promising for productivity and sales. Progress is so high that the first decision engine based on LLM will come out of research (see Open AI Q*).
This trend will show at work (“My workmate is an AI”), at P&L level (“My growth is an AI”), at IT level (“My IT is an AI”), and at a personal level (“My personal coach is an AI”). Four “mates” we’ll introduce now.
Mate 1 — My workmate is an AI
The concept of “copilot” is very much pushed by Microsoft, even stating that the “age of copilots” has started. It describes the idea well, supporting any office task. We’re not necessarily talking about the Microsoft “Copilot” product itself but about a sidebar or a pop-up that can overtake tasks (like Adept), do research (knowledge retrieval from Cohere), help brainstorm (Pi by Inflection), or help you fill a table faster (Microsoft Copilot)
Vertical AI is a new dimension, a dimension that makes sense. A LLM that is developed and trained for a specific industry, very close to business. For the retail industry, for call centres, for a telecommunication narrow case (SK Telecom investment in Anthropic), for lawyers (many examples around the building and reviewing of contracts), for financial advisors (for any tedious prep tasks before meeting a customer). The potential of these use cases is well-known but the power of LLM will make them accessible and super efficient. It is indeed all about efficiency gains.
In a factory, a warehouse, a supermarket so-called “augmented” workers will come. The expression is ugly, but the relief for a worker is great. Alongside the Gen AI and LLM dynamic, robotics is strongly progressing. We’ll experience 2024 new robots or torques for specific tedious use cases. More of them, and we’ll meet the first Tesla robots.
Mate 2 — My growth is an AI
In a complex business and process world, visualising key business KPIs will be key. A key for decision making. This is exactly what Amazon pushes with Q (a smart tool to analyse any data). The first step towards decision-making.
We love brainstorming with all these tools for ideas, concepts, and key visuals; imagining new products, and even testing their marketing. AI will be key for any market development, campaign production, and new product testing (at a very high frequency).
And there is this new concept of the AI deciding on its own and becoming a customer. Let’s imagine a car that does exactly this: automatically stops at free charging stations and orders the coffee. Or a supermarket that fully autonomously negotiates prices, reorders, and even refills shelves (with a robot). We could call this “my customer is an AI”.
Mate 3 — My IT is an AI
The second wave of Gen AI will have a profound influence on IT and all software development because code generation is spreading. For better code quality and faster coding. The use case of a code migration is somewhat fascinating, from a very tedious task to something automatic.
But the largest transformation will be the availability of many builders like the GPT builder or AWS PartyRock. One can write with natural language any AI app, a kind of “mini ChatGPT”. And it happens during a conversation with the machine. The result is “GPT” for one purpose that we’ll place in an app store. A completely new world of software development, accessible to everyone that can prompt well.
Mate 4 — My personal coach is an AI
Generative AI enters our personal lives with new assistants (Pi, family assistants) replacing the older Alexas, Siris and Google Assistants. Can you imagine? Being able to have a longer conversation with an assistant and not only “Hey Google, what’s the weather in Berlin today?” LLM will succeed where traditional assistants (Alexa is 9 years old) have failed. Imagine them in a car!
New gadgets and machines to talk to are appearing since we’ve got used to interacting with a machine like ChatGPT. Even diagnosis, the new health frontier where statistics and knowledge retrieval at scale will make a huge difference. The first experiments are present, like Neko (Spotify founder) in Stockholm and the power of LLM (Google demonstrates many AI medicine research use cases).
We stressed this already, the next big frontier of LLM is decision-making. The coming personal coach will help us with this. A big debate ahead of us.
2024 will be a very exciting digital year drawn by the race of AI and LLM that will become so common and smart that we’ll name them “mates”.
Btw, we run a new format: 3 steps and 3 workshops, our “best practice” to jump into generative AI. (Learn more)
Space and Lemon Innovations. The trend + AI specialist and optimist. In Hamburg, Berlin and everywhere where tech happens. Permanent scouting close-to-business.
Hamburg, 19.12.2023
Authors:
Astrid Delva (LinkedIn)
Stefan Barmscheidt (LinkedIn)
Laurent Burdin (LinkedIn)
