By Sindhu Gangadharan
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — much like data — is neutral when it comes to ethical decisions. It’s the humans behind these technologies and the organisations they represent who must instil ethical values and ensure responsible governance. As we are aware, the decisions made in this realm have profound impacts, both positive and negative. AI has caused both disruption and adaptation, with challenges like the digital divide coupled with social unrest balanced by the potential of AI to revolutionise traditional sectors like agriculture, healthcare, and education. As the year 2024 starts, AI, especially GenAI, continues to be top of mind for everyone, from CXOs to developers. Here are a few reasons why:
Infusing AI into the cloud: The combined power of cloud and AI will lead to a dramatic reinvention of enterprise applications in 2024 and over the next five years. This will offer organisations greater integration, scalability, performance, cost savings and security. By leveraging the automation capabilities of AI, with the flexibility of the cloud, businesses will be able to better predict operations and leverage a multitude of AI solutions to scale according to their needs.
Reimagining business processes: In 2024, GenAI will challenge conventional practices across industries and sectors. Starting from pioneering customer service chatbots to revolutionising language translation, GenAI will be introducing innovative experiences. It will be easier to track and maintain the performance and utilisation of business applications and services, helping avoid any potential downtime.
Customising LLMs: As business AI continues to mature in 2024, companies will use a greater number of LLMs. Enterprises will work with trusted technology providers that utilise the best LLM for a specific task, optimising accuracy while considering the compute cost trade-off on topics such as content creation, code creation, question and answering, or summarisation.
Clean data is key: In 2024, we’ll see first-hand that AI is only as effective as the quality and availability of your data. With the huge number of data and transactions running through business systems and business networks, SAP is uniquely positioned to help organisations access the data they need, visualise it, and take decisive action to drive their success.
Developer productivity: In 2024, we can expect to see a surge in the use of GenAI by developers to create new products and services, and to automate repetitive tasks, improve software quality, generate new ideas, and personalise software development.
Guardrails & regulations: We need governance frameworks that serve as the bedrock for responsible commercialisation of AI as a technology. How these regulations will impact the commercialisation aspect depends on how as an industry and global community we shape these frameworks. The choices we make today will shape the future of AI, the future of our businesses, and our future as a human race. But it’s essential to ensure that laws and frameworks do not stifle innovation.
The author is SVP, MD, SAP Labs India, vice-chairperson, Nasscom
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