AI fever has infused every industry with a heavy dose of artificial intelligence, and enterprises are reshaping business models to put AI front-of-mind.
How does that look, in practice? In a word, it involves chaos, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante.
“I think AI injects a lot of chaos into the system and a lot of disruptions. We were kind of debating who takes advantage, incumbents or disruptors,” Vellante said. “One thing’s for sure. Everybody’s life is going to get disrupted by AI in some way, shape, or form.”
Of course, there is currently a lot of enthusiasm, many great use cases, and a lot of great innovations around AI at present. But there’s no question that industries and jobs will be disrupted due to the new technology.
The democratization of generative AI is going to change everything. More than 80% of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs and models or deployed generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, according to Gartner. That’s up from less than 5% in 2023.
“Generative AI will drive a democratized workplace, empowering employees with knowledge and skills to achieve their potential. IT leaders must harness its value to increase productivity, cut costs and create growth opportunities, while also mitigating its significant risks,” wrote Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst with Gartner, in a release.
There’s no question that generative AI represents the story of the year. So, how are industries implementing the democratization of AI, and how are they grappling with the technology’s benefits and risks? Ahead of Supercloud 4, an editorial event by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, we explore top AI democratization themes of 2023. Follow our special reporting here.
Impacts across industries
Over the past year, theCUBE has frequently been profiling the unique use cases of AI, and highlighting the innovations around the technology. The democratization of AI has even reached places one might not initially consider.
Take the world of baseball. The Boston Red Sox has tapped into generative AI to rethink marketing campaigns. The team has been looking at outbound marketing to ensure fan interest remains high even in periods when notches aren’t being made in the wins column, with generative AI becoming a campaign companion.
The AI Marketing Solution identifies specific audience segments to create custom content, hasten time to market and maintain a consistent brand message.
During a recent panel hosted by Google Cloud at its Next 2023 conference, Brian Shield, chief technology officer for the Red Sox, explained the team’s thinking when it comes to the use of generative AI. Building a multiyear roadmap is important because things are changing so quickly, Shield noted.
“Generative AI is not a finished product, but rather an accelerant that brings people closer to the end objective,” Shield said.
The democratization of AI has also increasingly been integrated into the financial services industry in recent months.
Last month, during the SAS Explore event, much of the talk was around SAS Institute Inc.’s billion-dollar investment in advanced analytics solutions. The threat landscape these days has grown increasingly complex, making such solutions more valuable.
The move was the result of SAS customer feedback, requesting real-time balance sheet management and asset liability management, according to Jack Thompson, head of U.S. financial services at SAS. The goal is to help financial service providers mitigate fraudulent activities while carving out possibilities for profitability.
“As the artificial intelligence hype cycle extends and as we see the reality of what AI can bring to the table, it’s also important that you have governance, scale and control,” Thompson said.
Food and security
These days, every company is a data company, and the rise of AI has led to the need for incredible amounts of data. Projections indicate that data centers are projected to become the world’s largest energy consumers, rising from 3% of total electricity use in 2017 to 4.5% by 2025.
Such massive amounts of data pose large challenges, and various companies, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., have sought in recent years to use its computing capacity and other capabilities to attack such problems. The company recently joined the Linux Foundation in a new open-source community called AgStack, aiming to improve global agriculture efficiency.
“We are a founding company as part of that new community, and we have shared the concepts around data spaces and the metadata layer standardization that we’ve envisioned,” said Janice Zdankus, vice president of innovation for social impact at HPE. “That’s just getting kicked off, but it’s also a great first step for us to kind of build an open-source community around it.”
Through all of this, one of the biggest concerns has to do with security, which is deeply intertwined with AI. In April, big data analytics company Splunk Inc.’s State of Security 2023 report indicated that 52% of organizations have suffered a data breach in the past two years. That’s up from 49% in 2022 and 39% in 2021.
The pairing of security and AI can be seen in partnerships, such as the one between CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and Hammerspace Inc. Through it all, it reveals that supercloud isn’t just a buzzword, but instead a fundamental shift in technology, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier.
“It’s the IT market. It’s the developers. They’re building the next-generation infrastructure and software that has to run on all environments, all clouds,” he said. “Supercloud talks about that career path that’s the intellectual capital of the human. And now you got data with AI, which is a data capital … this is what supercloud represents, that whole generational shift.”
A look ahead
During its annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, the trend towards democratized generative AI led the way for Gartner’s 10 strategic technology trends to emerge in 2024. The analyst firm said generative AI has the “potential to transform the nature of work, enabling businesses to drive growth and achieve success more quickly.”
AI’s rapid advancement has meant applications powered by human intellect and data have become valuable intellectual property, according to Furrier. It means that every job, in some way, will see impacts moving forward.
“This is what supercloud represents, that whole generational shift. To me, it’s IT for the next 20 years. It’s security for the next 20 years. It’s data and data management, data coding for the next 20 years. It’s apps for the next 20 years,” Furrier said.
Though everything is evolving so quickly, it’s important to keep on top of trends and make predictions about what comes next. In the next three to five years, that could involve a set of intelligent data apps requiring a new type of modern data platform to support them, referred to as a “sixth data platform” by Vellante in a recent edition of his Breaking Analysis series.
“In our previous research we’ve used the metaphor “Uber for everyone” to describe this vision, meaning software-based systems that enable a digital representation of a business,” Vellante wrote. “In this model, various data elements, such as people, places and things, are ingested, made coherent and combined to take action in real time. Rather than requiring thousands of engineers to build this system, we’ve said this capability will come in the form of commercial off-the-shelf software.”
Generative AI is indeed changing everything. Whether it’s a sixth data platform or more, the coming months will be fascinating to watch as that evolution continues to play out.
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