AI will thrive in 3 key areas in 2023 despite economic conditions

Some of the biggest tech names laid off artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workers this fall, including Meta, Twitter and Amazon. In light of that, it would make sense for industry nerves to be high going into 2023, but that’s not the case.

Even in the midst of a possible recession, AI experts from various industries told VentureBeat that they expect AI innovation to continue and companies to adjust budgets and priorities accordingly. In fact, these industry leaders convincingly underlined three areas where AI has thrived over the past year and will continue to grow in 2023: workplace automation and human-centric AI; data-driven AI decision-making; and generative AI use cases.

“The US is knee-deep in recession, but despite the economic uncertainties facing consumers and businesses, I predict that AI will remain not only resilient but also recession-proof,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO of Diepgram, an AI-powered transcription tool. “AI will continue to be at the center of business in 2023, cutting costs and increasing innovation. Simply put, AI will help us do more with less.”

While some hear “cutting costs and increasing innovation” as workplace automation and artificial intelligence tools driving them out of their jobs, several leaders say automation is more likely to take over mundane tasks, freeing employees to focus on more advanced tasks.

“AI will not replace humans anytime soon — nor should it,” said Vishal Sikka, founder and CEO of the human-centric AI platform. Vian AI. “The reality is that AI today, as impressive and powerful as it is, is nowhere near human judgment. In 2023, there will be a growing recognition that too many platforms are not designed for human use. More and more systems will be designed to enhance human judgment – ​​to help people and encourage AI symbiosis, rather than trying for AI to replace the user.”

Human-machine interactions need human-oriented solutions

As artificial intelligence continues to change the way we work and the tools we use for work, several experts say the tools themselves also need to become more human-centric — simplifying things in day-to-day workflows or creating a platform that facilitates two-way human and technological interactions.

“We will see the proliferation of easy-to-use, non-technical AI systems,” said Zeeshan Arif, founder and CEO of software development company whiz pool. “They will build more AI systems internally to help them streamline their operations and improve their customer service.”

Pieter Buteneers, director of engineering in ML and AI at Sincha cloud communications platform, reiterated this, telling VentureBeat that AI will likely move away from keywords heading into the new year as it “progresses”[es] towards real understanding and understanding.”

Developments in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) are also likely to take place in this vein, industry leaders told VentureBeat, noting that these technologies can help scale business processes.

“NLP is revolutionizing the way humans interact with machines; these technologies can understand what people are saying, respond appropriately to that information and respond accordingly,” said Devanshu Bansal, co-founder of The X Future, an ideation platform for business teams. “NLP has much more to offer than just communicating clearly with users; it can also help scale businesses by helping them understand the voice of the customer.

Additionally, with increasing progress toward human-centered AI, and particularly in NLP and LLMs, Julien Salinas, founder and CEO of NLP Cloudan AI startup deploying LLMs predicts that these advancements could even make the technology more affordable.

“We continue to see steady growth in adoption of AI technologies when it comes to natural language processing,” said Salinas. “I expect large language models to become cheaper due to the many low-level optimizations currently being made by the AI ​​community.”

AI and ML models will be driven by quality data

While AI has experienced rapid growth over the past year, some say it’s not advancing fast enough and is getting stuck in a “stone age” of sorts – which is why so many ML projects failure. Looking ahead to 2023, this is something that industry leaders are increasingly aware of and are striving to address.

Sameer Maskey, CEO of Belay machinesan educational AI platform and professor of AI at Columbia University, told VentureBeat that “enterprise-level data silos continue to be a major obstacle…organizations are slowly beginning to understand that AI success depends on data, and a lot of it.”

As a result, Maskey expects to see more solutions that enable access to “credible data pools that will help companies take advantage of AI-powered efficiencies.”

One solution emerging to address AI’s data hunger is the use of synthetic data, which Gartner predicts will be used to 60% of AI projects by 2024. Another is using base models, which are typically trained on large amounts of unlabeled data and then combined with smaller sets of labeled data to drive problem solving.

“The overall trend towards data-centric AI appears to be accelerating,” said Ulrik Stig-Hansen, president and co-founder of computer vision company Encord. “This lowers the barriers to entry for companies to monetize their data and stuff [being] equality should lead to wider adoption of these technologies. In the coming year, companies will have to learn how to use data strategically. Here they can really discover the competitive advantage of AI.”

Generative AI use cases will explode

Advances in generative AI, which can be unofficially dubbed the “topic of the year” in the field, boomed this year and spawned several new companies and tools that are changing the way creatives and non-creatives do their job. Tools like DALL-E, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion generate original text-to-image concepts almost instantly after getting even the most obscure clues – like “an AI bot sitting on a throne”.

On top of the growing use cases, Encord’s Stig-Hansen predicts that “there will be a transformational leap in the availability of generative AI.”

This domain shows no sign of slowing down in 2023, with Gartner predict that generative AI will not only improve digital product quality, but also explain it by 2025 10% of all data produced – compared to a current 1%.

Generative AI is a tool that, while not completely replacing jobs yet, is raising curiosity among business sectors about what lies ahead.

“As the technology becomes more advanced, it will continue to be disruptive, not only for image and content development, but also for other industries such as speech recognition and banking,” said Deepgram’s Stephenson. “I predict that generative technology will soon act as an exoskeleton for humans – it will support the work we do and ultimately make for a more efficient and creative future.”

With the text-to-image, text-to-video, and upcoming text-to-3D capabilities that Generative AI brings, adoption of the tool will also increase — likely even beyond the technology and business spaces in others such as entertainment and the creative sector. professions, said Stig-Hansen.

“These AI models will only get better and become more photorealistic,” he said. “Space will evolve from just AI-generated faces to whole bodies in both image and video. There will also be huge adoption of generative AI in creative industries, including the music industry.”

Investors are also starting to take notice of the new technology, but some are waiting to see if it will remain all “hype” or if growth will solidify for a forward trajectory.

Bansal, the co-founder of The X Future, said their fund, Z Nation Lab, was an early investor in an AI-powered content generation platform Jasper AIand said he only sees it going up from here.

“Seeing the exponential growth that Jasper AI has achieved over the past two years makes me very optimistic about using generative AI in marketing,” said Bansal.

Comments for 2023

According to Fortune Business Insights, investment and growth in the artificial intelligence market in general is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. 2029.

Research giants including Gartner, Forrester and McKinsey are highlighting the huge development of AI. For example, Gartner analyst Afraz Jaffri recommends leaders “pay particular attention to innovations expected to become mainstream within two to five years” to gain a competitive advantage. Forrester expects AI software to grow 50% faster than the rest of the software market. And McKinsey researchers expect that too AIs adoption rate to continue rising.

“Enterprises can’t stop AI/ML’s tremendous power and promise from taking advantage of its opportunities, even as they navigate these incredibly rough economic waters,” said Lior Gavish, CTO of data observability platform. Monte Carlo. “With today’s tighter budgets and leaner teams, less is really more when it comes to optimizing the impact of AI/ML.”