Are you placing your bets already? Please let me guide you toward the future. Or try to.
We all want to win.
Failing that, we all want to back a winner. That way, we still believe we’re very clever, even if we didn’t actually do the winning ourselves.
If we tell people we made the right bets, adulation will rain down upon us like frogs at the end of Magnolia.
But when it comes to tech in 2024, everything would seem to revolve around the promise — and fearful portents — of generative AI.
Let’s think, then, about who’ll be the true tech leaders in 2024.
What sorts of businesses will win next year? They’ll all use AI in some way, won’t they? They’ll all be based on AI, surely.
Perhaps, but please forgive me for slathering myself in venality.
I can’t help wondering whether many businesses – old and new — will claim to use AI to deliver wonderful things, but not actually make money out of that AI wizardry.
When a new, supremely powerful technological idea emerges into a fuller light, the temptation is to leap on the bandwagon and allow the sweet slipstream of success to carry you along.
Pause, though, for thought.
This inexorable surge might be similar to olden tech times — when so many startups claimed they were the Uber of, I don’t know, mani-pedis or monkey-grooming. So many went the way of Icarus when investors — and even employees — discovered these companies made no money and would never make any money.
(Could it be that Uber is finally make a little money? That didn’t take long.)
In 2024, the businesses that’ll succeed are those actively proving that AI is making a material difference to real people’s lives – and having a material effect on their CFOs’ grudging positive emotions.
