Breakthrough development of artificial intelligence in 2024. Antti Nivala’s interview
Antti Nivala, Founder and CEO of M-Files, a knowledge work automation company, shared his predictions for the future of artificial intelligence in 2024 in an article published by the Digit News online publication.
2023 was a breakthrough year for the advancement and adoption of AI, with the technology rapidly becoming mainstream. However, artificial intelligence continues to evolve beyond our previous expectations, expanding into new applications, industries, and raising important ethical considerations.
So, what can we expect from artificial intelligence in 2024?
Knowledge management will become more holistic
Employee productivity is essential for business growth and profitability. Knowledge workers perform at their best when they are in a state of flow, where they can think creatively, solve complex problems, and focus on high-value work.
Anything that disrupts this “flow state” reduces their ability to deliver meaningful business value. Over the coming year, organizations are expected to take a more holistic approach to knowledge management, leveraging automation to improve the productivity of knowledge workers.
Automation can eliminate information chaos and streamline business processes by reducing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This enables employees to work more efficiently, make better-informed decisions, and deliver improved customer experiences.
Generative AI can unlock access to new sources of knowledge
The emergence of generative AI is taking knowledge work to the next level of transformation.
Organizations can expect significant benefits from automating data classification, extracting meaning from information, and interacting with data using natural language.
Knowledge workers will be able to leverage information embedded not only in documents but also in virtual meetings and communications, such as video conferences and online chats.
By unlocking an organization’s full intellectual capital, companies can improve employee productivity, gain deeper business insights, and deliver superior customer experiences.
Ethical AI will take center stage
Artificial intelligence has become a new focus of government regulation around the world. U.S. President Biden’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence and the EU AI Act aim to establish a stable regulatory framework and define guiding principles for the development of this rapidly evolving technology.
The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence represents one of the most significant opportunities in corporate history. At the same time, organizations must ensure that the AI solutions they use are built on high-quality, trustworthy data.
Since data quality lies at the heart of effective artificial intelligence, organizations must adopt an ethical approach to AI and understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) work and where they obtain their knowledge. LLMs can be powerful tools, but only when they are grounded in reliable information.
To promote the safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence, organizations will increasingly treat AI as an intern, viewing its outputs as recommendations rather than instructions.
We will also see more frequent validation of AI-generated results and greater human oversight to ensure that AI-driven decisions can be fully trusted.
Generative AI will continue to gain momentum—but not without overcoming several challenges
Generative AI is becoming increasingly popular in the financial services industry, with applications in customer service, fraud prevention, risk management, software development, and data analytics.
It has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars each year by automating repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on more creative and higher-value work.
However, several challenges must be addressed before it can be widely adopted, including tailoring AI to specific use cases, ensuring the reliability of generated outputs, meeting regulatory requirements, and overcoming the shortage of professionals with expertise in generative AI.
Generative AI holds tremendous promise, but it is still a long way from reaching its full potential in sensitive applications such as investment decision-making.
Financial services organizations should carefully evaluate the security and regulatory implications of artificial intelligence before implementing it on a large scale.
Data integration and governance will become essential
The lack of integration between systems disrupts the flow of information and creates data silos that artificial intelligence cannot easily overcome. For any AI solution to work effectively, it must have access to the data it is intended to process.
Beyond providing access, organizations must ensure that artificial intelligence receives only relevant and reliable data. In 2024, companies are expected to prioritize data governance across multiple systems to ensure their AI tools receive the right information across all critical business areas, helping them gain a competitive advantage.
The Year of AI Assistants
As AI assistants become a new addition to the workplace toolkit, organizations will need time to understand how to use them most effectively and unlock their full potential.
Contrary to the common belief that AI assistants are designed for a wide range of general-purpose tasks, 2024 is expected to see software vendors tailoring them to specific, high-value use cases. This will help knowledge workers access information more quickly, support creative work, and make software easier to use.
AI assistants will become more specialized and personalized. Users can expect their assistants to understand industry-specific terminology and tailor responses based on their role, responsibilities, and the tasks they perform.
Data governance will become a key component of AI success
Because AI assistants rely on the quality and relevance of content to deliver trustworthy responses, data governance will become one of the key priorities this year.
A common misconception is that simply giving an AI assistant access to a collection of documents is enough to produce reliable results. In reality, for artificial intelligence to perform effectively, content from multiple sources must first be cleansed, structured, and validated.
In 2024, we will see organizations increasingly leveraging metadata to improve the governance and management of enterprise data.
Artificial Intelligence Will Become More Accessible
Given the ongoing global economic uncertainty, organizations must carefully evaluate their long-term investments.
Businesses will need to strike a balance between risk, cost, and the fear of missing out on the latest technological innovations. Although the growing number of AI-powered capabilities has historically increased software costs, we can expect pricing models to evolve, making artificial intelligence more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses.
Rather than being offered solely as an add-on, artificial intelligence will become more widely accessible as vendors align the pricing of their AI solutions with customer expectations and budgets.
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