The 2020s: the decade of artificial intelligence

The 2010s was the digital decade. With companies like Uber and Airbnb disrupting traditional industries, many corporate boards and leaders recognized the need to step up investment in digital engagement with their customers, and technology was seen as an enabler of business value again. Since the preview release of ChatGPT in late 2022, we have seen tremendous enthusiasm for AI, and Gen AI in particular, from investors and corporate leadership. With companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Mistral releasing many models and associated technologies, and all cloud vendors providing access to many of these models through their respective platforms, we are seeing very significant investments and rapid evolution in this space.

Early business use cases are typically focused on search, information extraction, and summarization capabilities through chatbots over unstructured information from across many documents. We are seeing promising research to train and apply Gen AI in more data-centric use cases, such as time-series forecasting, and industry bigwigs are applying Gen AI to data they own to help monetize data assets further. Read our growing collection of Gen AI success stories below.

In the near-term, while rapid release of models and model enhancements is exciting, it does introduce too much churn for large-scale use in production environments. We also see the need for rigorous ML Ops (or Gen AI or LLM Ops as some would like to call it) to be able to move from Proof-of-Concepts to large-scale production deployments. In the medium-term, for full value, we see Generative AI complementing traditional AI and Data Science to solve higher value problems.

Just as customers demanded better digital capabilities from companies during the past decade, they will demand more intelligent capabilities. While it is likely to take a year or two to transition from the hype-zone to value-zone, the 2020s is promising to be the decade of Intelligence in technology.