Technologies in 2023 and Predictions for 2024. Part 3

Tech Trends in 2024: AI Advancements, Blockchain, and the Rise of Digital Identities

Continuation of NAVIGATING THE TECHNOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE OF 2023: FROM EDGE COMPUTING TO WEB 3 AND THE METAVERSE

Let’s start again with AI. I’m not going to go too much into detail, but what I see are bigger and more powerful AI models which will come into the market. I think this is the first thing we will see. I mentioned this Gemini model from Google, and then, also other companies are also catching up with bigger and more powerful models – something we will definitely see in 2024.

We will also see more applications evolving out of generative AI. These are, for instance, generative design and product design applications, which can also include generative video, generative audio, and generative speech, which can help you to create a professional presentation. Some of these generative AI tools are already available for making presentations or creating videos. We are still at the very beginning right now, and of course, they initially might not support everything you really need. So probably you also have to support some things manually. But in 2024, these trends will accelerate extremely, and we will see amazing tools – that means you and I will be able to create videos like professional marketing videos, which you could hardly do before. And the good thing is, you don’t even have to be an expert.

We will also see other aspects of AI models, such as multimodal models. Currently, if you use ChatGPT, it only works with text. It’s only text data as input data, and you get text data as an output. But when you, for instance, want to do something with with images, you have to use applications like DALL·E or Midjourney. These are currently some of the most prominent tools based on generative AI. I believe that we will see models which incorporate multimodal features. This means you can use text, images, or videos as an input, and you can expect to receive, as an output of these models, a mixture of different media types. It could be a video as an output; it could be an audio file as an output; it could be a simple text, or a mixture of all of them. This is something, I assume, will happen in 2024.

Then there is something not a lot of people have been talking about, but since I am a visionary in some tech areas, we will see first progress on interoperability and so-called federation on AI models. For certain models which are there for specific purposes, which do a specific job or act as an expert, like in the medical area, in business marketing or in financial applications, we will find ways to federate these separately existing models, while they will become interoperable with each other. This might even be the first step to the big vision of “general artificial intelligence” I wouldn’t be surprised when will see first progress on this as well.

As I mentioned before, prompt engineers will be much more popular in 2024. Not a lot of people heard about this profession yet. In 2024, prompt engineers or so-called AI whisperers will become more prominent. And then, we will likely see a hyper-personalization with AI services and applications, which use generative AI in order to achieve personalization, as well as to improve the customer journey. We will see this coming up in lots of applications and services. It is estimated, and this estimation does not come from me, but major market studies, which estimate that 30-40% of enterprise applications will come with conversational AI. This is what ChatGPT has as an embedded feature. If you talk about ERP systems or other kinds of other business applications, they will have this feature on board. Hyper-personalization is something that will be very different from the type of personalization we have seen before. This will be the next level of personalization.

Let us also mention education – education regarding generative AI in schools and educational institutions. I’ve seen a lot of this in 2023, and I’ve heard a lot about people who are doing their bachelor’s or master’s thesis, while they had conflicts with the universities while their professors and evaluators were saying, ‘you used ChatGPT in your thesis and that’s not legitimate, you have to develop your thesis without these tools’. Others were quite open, accepting this as a new technology that is here to stay. On the contrary, AI will become introduced in all kinds of applications, and we all have to deal with this – this is part of the game. It will be more about who is able to use AI in a reasonable and intelligent manner. These will also get the best results.

People who are not able to leverage the potential of AI, will not receive anything useful or gain high-quality results. This is something education in schools or the curriculum in universities have to consider. They have to find teachers and lecturers that are experts. They actually have to find ways, methods and principles of how this can be integrated into the lectures, and into the examinations. Education at schools and universities will have to deal with this, and I’m sure that we will see and hear a lot of debates in 2024.

Further trends that we will experience in 2024 are the growth of edge computing and IoT. Although, this is a trend which has been going on the last couple of years, it’s therefore nothing new, but I think we will have more and more applications being adopted. I can see this because I’m involved in a lot of research projects, and I recognize that edge computing and IoT are still a big topics. We currently have some projects that integrate these topics. For instance, we will have integration of AI and machine learning in data analysis; We will also see blockchain as a service coming up. For instance, companies who are offering blockchain as an infrastructure provider, saying, ‘Okay, we have blockchain as a backend technology where we can offer blockchain as a service’. As such, there will be more and more companies who will be offering these kinds of technologies and services.

I also see a convergence between these technologies, which is very important. I’ve been mentioning this already for a while, and I think we have to be aware that we should not consider AI and blockchain separately. These technologies will converge, which means blockchain will make use of AI and AI will make use of blockchain. These are two major technologies. Take, for instance, collaborative learning or so-called federated learning. People who know about AI, they know what I’m talking about. This means you have lots of local models, as well as one global model. All of those local models are helping the global model become better and to improve. You can put a blockchain layer on top of this for instance, which makes sense to make this solution more secure and trustworthy for all of the partners who do not know each other, who are participating and contributing with their data. There are also other good examples where blockchain and AI would make sense, and I see a convergence in those technologies. We will see more of that in 2024 and 2025.

We will also encounter applications in the financial sector, for instance, decentralized finance, maybe companies experimenting with e-money. I think this will happen and I’m not talking about cryptocurrencies. E-Money is more like a stable coin. These are already solutions which exist in the retail space, and there will be a lot of companies who will be testing these kinds of solutions.

We’re talking about e-money running on a blockchain, and this will significantly reduce the costs of transactions, and also make microtransactions feasible. You can send fractions of a cent from one part of the world to the other part of the world within one second and it would cost almost nothing. This will start to happen in 2024,  although, it could be that it will take some time for these applications to go mainstream. Nonetheless, I have seen that these kinds of solutions are already on the market and the first players are ready to go live. We are even using an e-money provider within our solution in our startup company REDIMI. This means, we are offering it to the customers, although the customers are not ready for that yet. So, this is a bit of a perspective for the future.

Last but not least, we will see decentralized digital identities. We have, for instance, a new project which started recently and supported through a major grant program. Maybe people who are in the crypto space heard of that…We have received a grant from the “XRP Ledger Grant Program”, which is connected to the company Ripple, who support these kinds of projects. During the next 12 months we want to provide a contribution regarding decentralized identities that we are developing on behalf of our company REDIMI. As such, we are developing a digital decentralized identity solution, which we will offer as a module that can be connected with retail applications, banking applications, or financial applications, in order to facilitate KYC and anti-money laundering processes, particularly when you’re dealing with the digital euro or central bank digital currencies. I will not go into more details about the digital euro – I am myself expert member of the Digital Euro Association, that means, I’m involved in these topics.

But I can say as much as that I think the introduction of the digital Euro will still take a couple of years. We will not see anything being implemented in 2024, but rather beyond 2024. Until then, we have e-money, and e-money is actually quite similar in a practical manner. Therefore, I think before the digital euro is officially introduced, we will see e-money applications coming into being, starting in hopefully in 2024.