AI boom brings challenge for tech companies

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA

Technological advancements have always helped organizations to scale, but have never really offloaded or augmented human intelligence. The AI boom brings both opportunities and challenges for tech companies. While AI technology holds tremendous potential, it also presents certain challenges that companies must navigate.

Advances in AI are expected to have far-reaching implications for the global enterprise software, healthcare, financial services and cybersecurity industries. A new wave of AI systems will have a major impact on employment markets around the world. 

Most of the tech companies are investing heavily into AI. This is because AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and businesses. For example, AI can be used to improve customer service, develop new products, and automate tasks.

As per the report from PwC, AI-related productivity savings and investments are generating $15.7 trillion worth of global economic output by 2030, almost equivalent to the gross domestic product of China. AI is now the biggest spend for nearly 50% of top tech executives across the economy.

The big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Apple, Meta and SAP are currently driving an incredible amount of innovation and development, making it difficult to keep up with the constant stream of new models and technologies and are actively acquiring AI startups to strengthen their AI capabilities.

However, Google is now facing competition from OpenAI and Microsoft, particularly in the field of generative AI. At Google I/O, the focus was on Bard, a chatbot aimed at competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Some experts feel that Google’s recent approach has been reactive and divergent from its innovation-focused past. The company has shifted its AI operations to prioritize quick product launches, which has led to concerns about neglecting its AI history and potentially falling behind in the market.

Leading high-end chipmaker Nvidia, that makes specialist AI chips, has taken advantage of the AI boom, with its graphics cards becoming the de facto standard in data centers around the world. It provides the massive processing power needed to run advanced AI applications. With this Its market value briefly passed $1trn.

Total spending on AI systems is forecast to reach $97.9 billion in 2023, up from $37.5 billion in 2019. For the five-year period ending in 2023, the AI sector is predicted to grow at an annualized rate of 28.4%.

Technology is making inroads in business applications, improving the day-to-day efficiency of knowledge workers, helping scientists develop drugs faster and accelerating the development of software code, among other things.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technological advance in decades. It’ll change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. It has the potential to transform industries ranging from medicine to sales to software development. And this potential is finally being realized.

The AI industry is poised to grow to an estimated $126 billion by 2025. Today, AI has become essential for an increasing number of businesses as remote work and reliance on technology are the new daily norm. As the AI goldrush, spearheaded by technologies like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, gains momentum, its growing prevalence is driving demand in data centers.

Investors are chasing exposure to generative AI, the technology run by ChatGPT that learns from analysing vast datasets to generate text, images and computer code. Businesses are trying to use generative AI to speed up video editing, recruitment and even legal work. Generative AI can streamline business workflows, automate routine tasks and give rise to a new generation of business applications.

Going forward, Artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.  It could replace a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe but may also mean new jobs and a productivity boom.

AI needs to be deployed in cybersecurity more broadly because it is being used by hackers already, and they can gain an early advantage. At least in the short-term, experts say, generative AI will increase the ability of malicious actors to create social engineering content that makes it harder for users to distinguish it from legitimate data.

A malicious actor may steal email traffic as well as a victim’s address book, enabling spear-phishing messages that focus on the content of the victim’s recent conversations with each of their contacts, and uses the language and syntax for each.  

It is important to be prepared for the changes that AI will bring, and to develop policies that will help people in transition to new jobs.