7 rapid AI trends happening in 2024

In 2024, a prominent artificial intelligence trend is multimodal AI. Unlike previous models that concentrated on singular modalities like AI-generated text, videos, or images, multimodal AI combines these capabilities. Just as humans can process diverse sensory information at once, these multimodal models can interpret text and translate it to a video or audio and convert it to text, and so on.

These multimodal advancements are leading to more effective results. For example, ChatGPT-4, OpenAI’s multimodal language model, is starting to generate text from text, audio, and visual inputs (like uploading an image of the inside of your refrigerator and asking it to create a recipe based on the ingredients). 

In the real world, multimodal AI capabilities can help handle diverse types of data in fields like financial services, customer analytics, and marketing. This type of AI can automatically identify connections and patterns among different data sets, helping to uncover relationships between entities like customers, equipment, and business processes.

Here are a few specific ways these advancements can be beneficial:

• Financial Data: Multimodal AI can help analyze and derive insights from financial data, including stock market trends, investment patterns, or financial statements.

• Customer Profiles: By processing various data related to customers, such as their demographics, purchasing behavior, and preferences, AI can create comprehensive customer profiles for better targeting and personalization.

• Marketing Insights: By processing various data sources, AI can generate valuable marketing insights, such as identifying target audiences, optimizing advertising campaigns, and measuring their effectiveness.

This means that multimodal generative AI can process and derive insights from diverse data types, enabling businesses to make informed decisions, enhance customer experiences, and optimize operations.

Smaller language models (SLMs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to function effectively with fewer computing resources than large language models (LLMs). Despite their reduced size, SLMs still pack several billion parameters, allowing them to operate efficiently even on compact devices like smartphones. This accessibility is driving a surge in user-friendly AI applications, as SLMs only require a browser and don't demand significant financial investments.

This democratization of AI stands out as a key trend in 2024, promising further advancements as researchers push the boundaries of performance using carefully curated, high-quality training data (unlike LLMs, which rely on vast internet datasets). 

In the technology industry, Microsoft is diving into SLMs with models like Phi and Orca, which can do just as well as or even better than LLMs in certain areas. These new ideas demonstrate that you don’t always need a huge model to make AI work great, which could change how we think about AI in the future.

Another generative AI trend for 2024 is customizable AI models to cater to niche markets and user needs. Major tools like ChatGPT can be too broad and generalized for businesses, but tailored AI systems can allow for more personalization of your services. This also helps to improve privacy and security, as organizations have greater control over their data because it’s not being sent through third parties.

Industries such as healthcare, legal, and financial services can especially benefit from customizable AI due to their specialized terminology and practices. As more AI regulation emerges in the coming years, the demand for customizable models is likely to increase simultaneously.

It’s not easy to build a customizable model from scratch due to the high investment cost. As an alternative, many organizations modify existing AI models or use a customizable solution like the Khoros AI and Automation Command Center. This turnkey approach allows businesses to seamlessly integrate AI capabilities into their operations without the need for extensive technical expertise or resources.

For example, you can provide the knowledge and historical data you want to train AI bots with, then use easily configurable settings to control outputs like response length, generative freedom, and knowledge sources. As a result, you can automate more than 50% of inbound conversations with minimal effort.

AI’s far-reaching impact will touch almost every industry in 2024. AI offers substantial advantages in the business landscape, including scalability, enhanced accuracy, the automation of repetitive tasks, and accelerated completion of specific activities. Consequently, it liberates employees to focus on more intricate tasks, driving efficiency and productivity across the organization. Let’s take a look at some examples of the latest AI trends in different sectors:

AI trends in science

AI is rapidly becoming a cornerstone in scientific research, focusing on addressing pressing global challenges such as climate change, disease, and energy sustainability. This trend is evident in the development of Microsoft’s sustainable agriculture project, where they are using AI to improve weather forecasting and estimate carbon levels, among other tools, to combat climate change and enhance farm productivity.

AI trends in healthcare

In the healthcare industry, generative AI is helping to enhance access to care, detect diseases, and assist with product development. In 2024, we’re seeing healthcare organizations utilizing image-based AI models as diagnostic tools that can speed up interpretation, leading to earlier disease detection. There are even strides towards building the world’s largest image-based AI model to fight cancer from Microsoft and Paige.

AI trends in e-commerce

With the help of AI, the retail and e-commerce industries can easily personalize the shopping experience as AI algorithms can quickly analyze vast amounts of customer or third-party data to deliver product recommendations or a tailored shopping experience. Other AI trends in e-commerce include:

• Automated dynamic pricing (adjusting pricing in real-time based on various factors)

• AI-powered search and discovery to better capture customer intent and lead them to the exact product they’re searching for

• Chatbots and virtual assistants to engage with customers

AI trends in telecommunications

For the telecommunications industry, it’s important to stay on top of rapid technology advancements and meet increasing customer expectations, which is why AI offers this industry an abundance of opportunities. In this sector currently, AI is being used to spot patterns in large amounts of data and proactively monitor network performance, disclosing errors instantly, detecting root causes, and relaying this information to employees, helping them be more efficient. 

AI trends in manufacturing

Artificial intelligence is also revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. Some of the more popular use cases in 2024 are using AI to manage supply chains autonomously, proactive maintenance (assessing the health of machinery and providing those insights to manufacturers, and rapid prototyping and rendering.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, people have been experimenting with different ways to use this technology, especially at work. Shadow AI, the unofficial use of generative AI tools at work, has emerged as a consequence of employees seeking quick solutions without prior approval or oversight from IT departments. As AI becomes more accessible, this trend is becoming more prevalent.

To put it into perspective, Ernst & Young recently surveyed 1,000 Americans working a desk job and found that 90% of respondents reported using at least one AI technology. The absence of proper oversight raises concerns over security and data privacy. For example, an employee may unintentionally feed trade secrets to an LLM without realizing the potential risks.

As this trend continues to evolve, businesses should address shadow AI by setting clear AI use policies or approved platforms. It’s worth looking into how different teams want to use AI and see if a secure solution can be implemented. Adopting an AI automation command center like Khoros offers businesses flexibility and control, enabling them to centralize AI parameters and brand safety controls across any built-in or third-party AI services.

While on the topic of AI use risks, the demand for AI regulation is increasing. With the widespread adoption of AI, deep fakes, misinformation, privacy concerns, and AI bias are just some of the potential risks that many are concerned about. This is why moving forward into 2024, we’ll likely see more regulation and laws surrounding AI.

The European Union (EU) is working to pass one of the world’s first laws governing AI. One of its provisions is the prohibition of untargeted image gathering for facial recognition databases, development of biometric categorization systems prone to bias, implementation of "social scoring" systems, and leveraging AI for social or economic manipulation.

Countries and regions worldwide are beginning to set their frameworks and standards for AI governance, further addressing issues such as algorithmic transparency and accountability.

AI certainly empowers contact centers, with customer-experience chatbots to help resolve common questions or direct customers to specific resources. But in 2024, we’re seeing artificial intelligence support virtual agents by acting as agent assistants. For example, AI can analyze customer sentiment and provide recommended responses to help human agents provide better customer service. AI can also take on some of the more tedious tasks agents typically perform, such as summarizing and tagging conversations for historical reference.

As a result, AI offers a well-rounded support base for your entire customer service offerings. It can handle basic things to reduce agent requests, but when human agents are required, AI helps them work more effectively to improve customer interactions at all touchpoints. AI will also provide greater capabilities to support human agents as it advances.

The future of AI is rapidly evolving and it’s important for businesses to keep up with AI trends. As daunting or risky as it may seem, it doesn’t have to be difficult implementing AI into your business. AI has come a long way, from helping companies moderate their online communities, protecting their brand and executing social media posts, to utilizing AI-trained chatbots and supporting customer service agents.

Whether you have or want to build an online community, manage your social media, or enhance your customer service, Khoros has AI-powered solutions for next-level efficiency. Khoros AI gives you a single command center allowing you to add automation to every customer interaction across all channels, assisting you in delivering more efficient self-service customized to your brand voice and knowledge, and more.

Khoros AI is also built with safety in mind, with features like bias avoidance, data protection and governance, supervised learning to mitigate risk, and training and generative AI settings.

To learn more about how Khoros AI can help your business scale, request a demo today.