By Sunny Bedi
The advent of AI in the workplace has undeniably transformed the landscape of productivity, ushering in an era where artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool but a trusted partner to employees. At its core, the excitement around AI has been because it is empowering employees to do more with less – and the following trends will likely play out in 2024 as employees look to work smarter and be more productive in the coming year.
AI will become a trusted partner to employees
The recent emergence of AI assistants has been one of the most exciting ideas for workplace productivity. In the simplest terms, this is because it is helping employees become – and continue to be – efficient and effective. Take for instance, onboarding new recruits. Typically this is a complex endeavour – entailing education on systems, processes, and culture, alongside ensuring that the new hire quickly gains access to only the right systems and projects.
In 2024 and beyond, AI assistants can be expected to tune to specific departments and roles to provide that orientation, tied to their individual persona and accompanying them throughout their tenure at the company. As processes and needs mature, the AI assistant can then be trained to do the same thing by proxy, ensuring that new hires get the full wealth of knowledge from the get go. Down the line, these AI assistants will eventually start contributing to larger enterprise knowledge – namely, by ingesting new documentation and thorough feedback from existing employees, as well as scouring the internet for new ways to optimise processes, and more. This will quickly become the gold standard, which will see AI assistants become every employee’s best work buddy.
Developer productivity set for marked boost thanks to generative AI
Speak to the typical developer about how much of their code could be written by generative AI, and you’ll likely get a number that is far from insignificant. While this is generalised and anecdotal, that level of efficiency is real and could be a major game changer. Not only will this bring immense benefits to developer productivity, it will also enhance code reusability and sharing.
Simply put, AI generated lines of code that allow developers to be more efficient today, could be reused to help transform the AI tool from an assistive technology to a semi-autonomous technology tomorrow. And organisations are likely to take heed of this in 2024 as they embark on increasing the overall capabilities of future developments in the name of continous innovation. By continually improving the AI tool, organisations could then get it to extend code generation and efficiency even further, and leverage it again on other projects.
Additionally, 2024 could also see AI agents gradually being utilised to assist with testing and quality assurance, due to the need for speed when it comes to deployments. Make no mistake, developers will still be integral – especially to think creatively, solve problems, and drive innovation forward. That being said, their day-to-day activities and how they put to practice their expertise will change next year.
In little under two years, AI – and in particular, generative AI – has had a tremendous impact on the workforce. From new and smarter ways of performing duties, to enabling faster innovation and go-to market. 2024 will be another year of this bullishness, and could well herald a new dawn for the world of work.
The author is CIO, CDO, Snowflake
