Рубрика: AI

Generative AI, according to research and advisory firm Forrester, is the most impactful technological advancement since the internet.

Also: What Sam Altman's move to Microsoft means for ChatGPT's future: 3 possible paths forward

Forrester's 2024 forecast is strongly linked to AI because Forrester believes that generative AI will be a change agent for all business functions and industries. "It's time to think big and move fast. 2024 will redefine business as we know it," said Sharyn Leaver, Forrester's chief research officer. "Generative AI will be the fulcrum that businesses rely on to enhance, empower, and engage employees and customers — with or without you. Embrace the misstep, and think big."

Here are the top 15 Forrester predictions for 2024:

1. Generative AI will seep into consumers' lives. 60% of skeptics will use (and love) generative AI — knowing it or not.
2. AI will spur the age of creativity. Enterprise AI initiatives will boost productivity and creative problem-solving by 50%. Current AI projects already cite improvements of up to 40% in software development tasks.
3. Agencies will bet big on "brand-specific" AI models. The top 10 agencies will spend $50 million in partnerships to build custom AI solutions for enterprise clients.
4. AI processing will hit a wall in 2024. Limited chip availability will drive common sense and tamper down irrational AI expectations.
5. The clouds will launch prompt engineering services to no avail. 80% of firms will add prompt engineering talent internally to accelerate value delivery. With incomplete contextual data and limited experience in natural language and prompt engineering among data scientists, cloud providers' first-gen prompt engineering services will not suffice when it comes to addressing tailored, fine-tuned needs.
6. Backstage will take center stage. An open-source developer portal created by Spotify and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Backstage will be the number one framework for self-service developer portals.
7. GenAI will augment customer service agents' capabilities. Customer Experience (CX) will improve for the first time in three years. Improvements will be most pronounced in Europe and APAC. In North America, the US will improve, while Canada will continue to struggle.
8. Marketers will become privacy champions. CMOs at five large consumer brands will fund dedicated privacy resources. Yet, only 17% of privacy decision-makers say that their organization's privacy team has marketing competencies or skills. To bust this bottleneck, five large B2C brands will earmark a portion of their marketing budget specifically to fund additional headcount to the privacy team and/or upskill existing privacy colleagues.
9. Generational differences will alter B2B buying preferences. Two out of five millennial buyers will demand early access to B2B product experts. Forrester predicts that 40% of younger buyers will rate person-to-person meetings with product experts as their most meaningful personal interactions. Top sellers should forge effective partnerships with these experts and effectively orchestrate all person-to-person interactions. Sellers who practice this will see their time spent on direct buyer engagement rise to 25% or more of their overall work week.
10. An "EX Winter" will freeze employee experience investments. In 2024, many teams that drive employee experience (EX) will suffer from a lack of funding or focus. Take diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), for example. The percentage of companies that funded a DEI function with an endorsed strategy and personnel dropped from 33% in 2022 to 27% in 2023. Forrester predicts that this number will fall to 20% by the end of 2024 in the wake of cuts that disproportionately affect DEI teams. Tech investments won't drive EX forward, either. While 66% of technology decision-makers who work in software say that they will invest in EX/human capital management software next year, those investments won't be used to their full advantage.
11. Europe will lead hybrid work adoption. 40% of European employees will work from home regularly. Only 11% of European business leaders expect employees to return to the office full-time. For comparison, in 2023, 28% of all US employees' workdays are spent working from home.
12. Climate risk will become employee experience risk. Employee action will force adaptation accommodations at five Fortune 500 firms.
13. Customer trust will remain up for grabs. News organizations will have a resurgence as trusted sources of information. According to Forrester's 2023 data, social media's reputation is disintegrating across the globe: 81% of online adults in the US, the UK, Spain, and Italy agree that there is a lot of fake news and misinformation on social media. The numbers aren't much better in metro China, where 63% of online adults agree with this sentiment.
14. APAC firms will struggle to operationalize customer trust. 25% of APAC multinational corporations will adopt customer trust as a key mission, but only 5% will measure it. Forrester estimates that by the end of 2024, 25% of APAC's largest companies will vocalize their strategic commitment to customer trust, but only 5% will effectively codify that commitment through measurement and organizational KPIs.
15. Regulators will have genAI in their sights. An app using ChatGPT will be fined for its handling of personally identifiable information.

Also: How AI reshapes the IT industry will be 'fast and dramatic'

We know that most people are concerned about the implications of generative AI on data security, ethics, and bias. In fact, 81% of customers want a human to be in the loop, reviewing and validating generative AI outputs. Research also validates that every AI project begins as a data project, but it's a long, winding road. Businesses need a new operating model to compete in an AI-powered economy. If you want your business to succeed in a world of AI, you'll need to operate in a boundless manner.

To learn more about Forrester's research and 2024 predictions, you can visit here.

Artificial Intelligence

When a company invests $13 billion in a startup, as Microsoft has with OpenAI, you would expect to get at least a few minutes prior notice when its board fired its market-leading CEO. Instead, news that OpenAI was firing Sam Altman hit everyone outside the board like a thunderbolt. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was probably not amused. But, as things shake out, he has reason to smile.

After OpenAI's attempt to backtrack from their shocking move failed to gain traction over the weekend, Nadella decided Microsoft would hire Sam Altman and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman. At Microsoft, they will lead a "new advanced AI research team." Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, had quit in protest of Altman's firing.

Also: Generative AI advancements will force companies to think big and move fast

It appears it won't just be Altman and Brockman who will push ChatGPT and other OpenAI-based technology at Microsoft. 505 of OpenAI's over 700 employees wrote in an open letter that unless the OpenAI board quits, they "may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary." Further, "Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."

Even OpenAI co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever, who voted to fire Altman, signed this letter and has had second thoughts. Sutskever wrote, "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together, and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.

Since that letter was published, almost all OpenAI employees have signed it, according to Maggie Hott, head of ChatGPT Enterprise & Account Associate teams. For his part, Altman is sure "We are all going to work together some way or other, and I'm so excited. One team, one mission."

After all, as Angela Jiang, a member of the OpenAI Global Affairs Team, tweeted, "OpenAI is nothing without its people." While some people have reacted sarcastically to the idea of an AI company valuing people, Jiang is right. AI programs are no replacements for bright people, and OpenAI is its engineers, developers, and visionaries.

Also: Does your business need a chief AI officer?

Nadella has kept saying polite things about OpenAI publicly, such as, "We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners."

But, in the same tweet, he also said, "We're extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success."

Altman added, "We are committed to fully providing continuity of operations to our partners and customers. The OpenAI/Microsoft partnership makes this very doable."

What will this look like? There are reports that Altman and Brockman may yet return to OpenAI — if, and it's a big if — the board members who fired him quit.

I'm confident that Nadella will do what's best for Microsoft. I don't know exactly what this will look like. My colleague, David Gewirtz, sees three ways forward: OpenAI goes its own course with whoever's left; Microsoft competes with OpenAI; or Microsoft acquires OpenAI.

Also: What Sam Altman's move to Microsoft means for ChatGPT's future: 3 possible paths forward

I see another way forward. For all intents and purposes, if Microsoft does indeed hire essentially everyone at OpenAI, the company doesn't need to compete with OpenAI. It's game over for OpenAI. The almost three trillion dollar enterprise won't need to buy it.

Before all this broke, OpenAI was seeking a valuation of $90 billion, and it looked like it would get it.

But now, instead of paying anything, Microsoft could get all of OpenAI's engineers for the price of picking up their salaries. Talk about a deal!

As Macquarie analyst Fred Havemeyer said, "We see an opportunity where Microsoft ends up consolidating and essentially acquiring OpenAI without actually having to tender any sort of acquisition." Exactly.

The stock market agrees. Microsoft shares rose 2.1% to an all-time high close of $377.44 on Monday. That beat the previous record of $376.17 and gave the tech giant a total valuation of about 2.75 trillion dollars. Not bad!

Technically this is a big deal for Microsoft as well. The company has stated that at Microsoft, "Artificial intelligence (AI) is the defining technology of our time." As Bill Gates recently said when he saw OpenAI ChatGPT at work, "I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface." As you may recall, he took the idea of the GUI and turned it into the dominant desktop of the last 40 years: Windows.

Also: Will AI hurt or help workers? It's complicated

In its last quarterly earnings, Microsoft reported that the above-forecast use of AI helped drive a 29% year-over-year increase in revenue for Microsoft's cloud business. Nadella added at the time, "We are making the age of AI real for people and businesses everywhere. We are rapidly infusing AI across every layer of the tech stack and for every role and business process to drive productivity gains for our customers."

That's not just hot air. At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced one AI initiative after another. This included new versions of Copilot to help people get work done beyond programming; GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, which will let GPT work with video; and Azure AI Studio, for companies that want to build their own generative AI programs.

Put it all together, and it seems crystal clear to me that not only is Microsoft hiring all of OpenAI a smart move, but really, it's a necessary one. Microsoft must have what OpenAI was delivering, and hiring Altman and others is a sure-to-win move.

Artificial Intelligence

On Nov. 20, Amazon revealed the “AI Ready” commitment, a set of courses, a scholarship and a collaboration with Code.org to promote generative artificial intelligence skills. Amazon wants to provide 2 million people across the globe with the skills needed for lucrative generative AI-focused careers by 2025. In addition, Amazon is offering cloud computing skills training.

“Amazon is launching AI Ready to help those with a desire to learn about AI and benefit from the tremendous opportunity ahead,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services, wrote in Amazon’s announcement.

Jump to:

• Free generative AI training courses for professionals and beginners
• The AWS Generative AI Scholarship assists high school and university students
• Amazon and Code.org team up for Hour of Code for students
• AI Ready courses add to existing library of AI and cloud resources

Free generative AI training courses for professionals and beginners

The following generative AI training courses are available for free from Amazon via AWS Skill Builder for developer and technical audiences:

• Foundations of Prompt Engineering.
• Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS.
• Building Language Models on AWS.
• Amazon Transcribe — Getting Started.
• Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock.

The following generative AI training courses are available for free from Amazon for beginners and students:

• Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence via AWS Educate.
• Generative AI Learning Plan for Decision Makers via AWS Skill Builder.
• Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer via AWS Educate.

Employers seek AI skills

Many employers (73%) are interested in hiring people with AI-related skills, a November survey from Amazon and Access Partnership found. However, three out of four of the same employers have trouble finding people to meet their AI talent needs.

“If we are going to unlock the full potential of AI to tackle the world’s most challenging problems, we need to make AI education accessible to anyone with a desire to learn,” Sivasubramanian wrote in the announcement post.

The AWS Generative AI Scholarship assists high school and university students

Amazon will offer a total of $12 million over 50,000 Udacity scholarships for high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities around the world. Scholarship recipients will gain access to free courses, hands-on projects, on-demand technical tutors, coaching industry mentors, career development resources and guidance in creating a professional portfolio.

Interested students can apply on the AWS AI & ML Scholarship program site.

Amazon and Code.org team up for Hour of Code for students

In collaboration with Code.org, Amazon will host an Hour of Code during Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 4–10, for students and teachers involved in kindergarten through 12th grade. The hour-long introduction to coding and AI will invite students to create their own dance choreography using generative AI.

Code.org runs on AWS, and Amazon has provided free AWS Cloud computing credits worth up to $8 million for the Hour of Code.

SEE: Compare Google Cloud and AWS Cloud’s capabilities as cloud hosting services.

AI Ready courses add to existing library of AI and cloud resources

These courses, scholarships and events come in addition to Amazon’s existing free cloud computing classes. Amazon has a goal of giving 29 million people the right skills for cloud computing careers by 2025.

Amazon also offers over 80 free and low cost training courses through AWS’s educational artificial intelligence and machine learning content library. Taking some of these courses alongside generative AI training could broaden one’s understanding of how different AWS and Amazon capabilities work together, as well as contextualizing their places in the larger world of AI and ML technologies.

What's the Black Friday deal?

Amazon's Black Friday sale is on and the Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni is a whopping $407 off for a limited time.

Why this deal is ZDNET-recommended

You know that gratifying feeling of coming home to a clean house? With a family of five, that's not a feeling I often get, if at all. Enter the Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni.

Also: Ecovacs announced a new robot vacuum that squares up to the competition

I've tested a fair share of robot vacuum and mop combinations, so I quite appreciate the experience of having a robot roaming around my home that picks up crumbs, dust, and everything in between. But the Deebot X2 Omni is the best robot vacuum and mop I've tried.

ZDNET RECOMMENDS

Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni

This high-end robot vacuum and mop has been engineered to give users a hands-free cleaning experience.

View at Amazon

Ecovacs launched the Deebot X2 Omni today, a new flagship robot vacuum and mop combo with a clear edge. After testing it out for a couple of weeks, I've found room for improvement in some tasks — largely outweighed by its long list of strengths.

The X2 Omni checks all the specs boxes for a high-end robot vacuum and mop. It has 8,000Pa of suction power, higher than the 6,000Pa of the current market leader, the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra. Using artificial intelligence (AI), the robot can detect and avoid objects strewn about the floor, such as socks and charging cables, and has a mopping pad that automatically lifts 15mm when carpets or rugs are detected.

Also: The best robot mops you can buy

The Omni station charges the robot vacuum and mop and works as a base where it empties its dustbin and self-washes and dries its mop pads. This feature means you only have to worry about keeping the base station's clean water tank filled and its dirty water tank empty, which you must complete every few cleaning cycles.

Designed to be a hands-free experience, the base station is also self-cleaning. Running the self-cleaning option in the Ecovacs app will clean the base plate in the station — the spot where your mops are cleaned that typically sees water and dirt accumulation. This feature is a level above competitors like Yeedi, which requires users to periodically clean dirty water at the bottom of the docking station.

The dust bag holds everything the Deebot X2 sweeps from your floors and only needs emptying about once a month, although your mileage may vary.

One of my only gripes is that the clean water tank feels awkward to hold when filled — it almost feels like it's not built to last, although I won't know for certain until I've used it for several months. It's a four-liter water tank with a handle to carry it on the lid, held shut by a plastic clip. I hold the tank from the bottom because I feel like using the handle to carry the full tank around will result in the closure failing and four liters of water going everywhere.

About the square shape

The Deebot X2 Omni has several superpowers, starting with its compact package. The squared edges stood out to me as a feature when I unpacked the device, along with how narrow and short it was. At only 12.6 inches wide, it's about 0.3 inches narrower than the Eufy X9 Pro robot vacuum mop, which had been my super mop until the X2 Omni arrived.

Although 0.3 inches sounds like a small difference in size, it's proven to be considerable when a robot has to navigate through furniture legs. Case in point: the Eufy X9 Pro uses AI to avoid objects, but whenever I sent it to clean the first floor, it'd get stuck between the kitchen barstools legs. The stools are fairly lightweight, so the robot would drag them around instead of signaling it was stuck. I'd see my kitchen barstools gliding around my floor or randomly find one hanging out by the shoe bench.

Also: The best iRobot vacuums

This isn't a big deal and is highly subjective, so it's not something I included in my Eufy review; it's not the robot's fault that it's the exact size as the width of the distance between my barstool's legs. But the narrower Deebot X2 Omni can clean under the barstools and figure its way back out, which means no more 'guess where the barstools are today' games.

The Deebot X2 is also almost an inch shorter than my Eufy robot vacuum, at 3.7 inches in height. The lower dimensions and narrow build allow the Deebot X2 to clean in places other robots typically can't reach or navigate under.

Some AI-powered features

The Deebot X2 leverages Ecovacs' AIVI 3D 2.0 and combines an AI processor with 3D-structured light sensors with dual-laser LiDAR technology. The result is efficient maps that allow the robot to detect objects during navigation and clean around them intelligently. This feature set means you won't have to ensure your floors are free of charging cables, toys, or shoes before sending out the X2.

The AI-powered navigation and obstacle avoidance, backed by Ecovacs' proprietary AINA Model, uses visual recognition and reinforcement learning based on sensor information.

Also: 6 things to know about robot vacuums before you buy one

The Deebot X2's clever technology also makes for a customized cleaning process if that's your thing. The device's AI-powered visual recognition, ability to detect floor type, and historical cleaning logs let the robot infer which room it's cleaning, such as the kitchen, living room, or bedroom, and adjust its suction power and mopping mode.

A new level of voice control

Voice control makes everything in my home easier. Countless robot vacuums let you use a third-party virtual assistant for voice control, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri. Saying, "Alexa, clean the floors" in my house dispatches the Eufy X9 Pro to clean my bedroom and hallway. However, these assistants are limited in the functions they can make the robot perform.

Sure, you can dispatch your robot with Alexa or Google, but have you ever been able to tell it to "turn right, move three meters forward, turn left, and clean there"?

Also: This robot vacuum connects to your home's water supply for full automation

Ecovacs robot vacuums have a built-in voice assistant named YIKO that users can talk with to control the robot directly — and it works swimmingly. Saying "OK, YIKO" wakes up the voice assistant. If your robot is out cleaning, you can ask it to return and clean the dining room again or give it multiple commands in one sentence without pulling up the app.

ZDNET's buying advice

The Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni is the company's new flagship robot with all the smart features and a price to match, at $1,500, though $407 off right now for Black Friday. Over the past few weeks, it's gained a top-dog position in our home, becoming the main robot to clean the downstairs floor — and that's saying a lot.

The great thing about an all-in-one, self-emptying, and self-cleaning robot vacuum and mop is that it's not best suited for some circumstances — it's suited for all. Some mid-range models might be great at mopping but suffer from not having strong or effective suction, making them best suited for homes with hard floors. Others might boast great suction power, okay mopping, and short battery life, making them best for mostly carpeted apartments or small homes.

The Deebot X2 Omni is great at all of these things. The biggest challenge in our home is downstairs because it's mostly hardwood and tile with some area rugs — it's where the dog comes in and out from the yard, where we cook, and where the toddler drops most of the crumbs.

Also: Skip the Dyson: This $150 stick vacuum is just as powerful (and can mop, too)

The X2 Omni's MSRP of $1,500 compares to $1,600 for the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra (also discounted at $400 off). Suppose I were looking for a hands-free robot vacuum and mop suitable for my home's complex needs. In that case, I'd have to choose the Deebot X2 Omni over the Roborock's flagship because the extra features, like the self-cleaning station and stronger suction, set it apart.

Chaos at OpenAI adds fuel to the AI talent poaching war

Salesforce among the first to make blanket offers

Christine Hall 8 hours

With most of OpenAI’s employees threatening to leave following Sam Altman’s ousting, company rivals might be missing the biggest opportunity of the year: poaching talent.

As chaos at OpenAI and Microsoft, where Altman is headed now, continues, companies like Anthropic, Mozilla or Patronus AI could be attractive to employees seeking stability. The upshot? OpenAI employees — a pool of highly sought-after AI experts — could scatter to other companies or follow Altman.

“That talent is the crown jewel of the organization,” Tammy Madsen, professor of management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University told TechCrunch. “This is a space where there is a wide gap in what companies are seeing that they need in terms of AI talent and applied AI, and in what they’re seeing in terms of what’s available.”

Case in point, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who earlier this afternoon posted on X that “Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese. Send me your cv directly to ceo@salesforce.com. Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted AI Enterprise Revolution.”

Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez also posted on X a link to his company’s career page and wrote the company was looking to hire “Machine Learning Members of Technical Staff.”

It may be difficult for just any company to court OpenAI employees even if compensation packages are eye-poppingly high. Altman has personally curated some of the company’s best talent, according to various media reports and social media posts.

Sam Altman ousted as OpenAI’s CEO

AI skills are in “critical demand”

As long as AI jobs remain in high demand, expect companies to keep those offers coming.

Madsen pointed to McKinsey tech trend statistics showing from 2021 to 2022, job postings in areas considered tech trends grew 15% amid a decline of 13% in global job postings overall. Within that year, applied AI and next-generation software development together posted nearly 1 million jobs.

All this is to say that “this particular skill base is in critical demand,” Madsen said. Which also makes this a time many of OpenAI’s major competitors “would see as an excellent opportunity to build up their AI talent force,” she added.

Frame AI CEO George Davis told TechCrunch via email that he expected “direct impact in terms of great talent coming on the market” and is also already seeing ongoing recruiting conversations.

“This weekend’s drama made clear that a lot of the talent in AI cares about both ensuring AI is safe,” Davis said.

Microsoft hires ex-OpenAI leaders Altman and Brockman to lead new AI group

Pros and cons of joining Microsoft

Some OpenAI employees will likely join Altman at Microsoft, where he and co-founder Greg Brockman will lead a “new advanced AI research team,” according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

But even those most loyal to Altman may have to weigh the downside of working at a large publicly traded corporation that while well-funded may have more bureaucracy and regulations to navigate.

“They’ve lost their champions,” she said, referring to employees losing Altman and Brockman. “They don’t trust the board to work in their best interest. They have an interim CEO now who said, ‘we need stability and success,’ but he also plans to make significant changes. So if you’re an employee sitting there, and you’re trying to decide, ‘do I move to Google? Do I move to Microsoft? Or do I stay here and wait it out?’ There’s a lot of unrest initially for them to sort of figure out what they’re going to be comfortable with.”

Madsen notes that as OpenAI employees figure out what they are doing today and will be doing tomorrow, little is known what this interruption means in terms of how much of the pace of development was disrupted or will be disrupted by these events.

Though there could be a silver lining. TechCrunch reporter Tim De Chant wrote that all of this disruption could very well “sow the seeds of the next generation of AI startups.”

OpenAI’s crisis will sow the seeds of the next generation of AI startups