TL;DR
- Gartner dives into 10 predictions for the future that represent opportunities or threats.
- Digital charisma filters are going to make us all individually better, according to analysts.
- By 2027 a quarter of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse talent across conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia to improve business performance.
- Generative AI will be a new machine-to human-interface and a new and increasingly important machine-to-machine interface.
“In 20 years, when we look back, we are going to think that this is the year that everything changed,” says Gartner analyst Leigh McMullen. “I don’t know if any of us feel like that future’s too futuristic anymore. I don’t think it feels like science fiction.”
Generative AI is going to make us all individually better, according to a new future trends report by Gartner. The report was unveiled by McMullen at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in a session entitled “Strategic Predictions for 2024 & Beyond: The Year Everything Changed,” that you can watch in full above.
“With generative AI we have the ability to let individuals profit from innovations and technology, free up time, become better at what they do, maybe even spend a little bit more time with their families,” McMullen said. “Generative AI has the ability to help us write better it has the ability to help us engage with our customers more intimately. It has the ability to make us more charismatic.”
The latter might seem odd but Gartner is actually predicting that by 2026 30% of workers will leverage digital “charisma filters” to achieve previously unattainable advances in their careers.
Which begs the question: What’s a charisma filter?
McMullen explains, “We’re talking about the ability to increase your presence in the spoken word, increase your presence in the written word, increase your presence in your organization, virtually.”
We’re already seeing technology from organizations like NVIDIA that will adjust your eyelines so you’re always looking right down the barrel of the camera and that will skinny you up or make you look a little bit prettier.
“Digital charisma filters are going to help us in our organizations achieve new sorts of personal heights that will help us achieve new levels of personal performance.”
It’s also going to become an indicator of national performance.
The analyst thinks that the productivity value of AI will be recognized as a primary indicator of national power. It’s not farfetched given that we already use indicators of productivity GDP and organizational productivity as a source of power by making it a national benchmark.
“By making it something that we report on as nations this will cause greater investment it will speed this transformation into a world where we all prosper.”
READ MORE: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2024 (Gartner)
By 2027, a quarter of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse talent across conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia to improve business performance.
“Neurodiversity and cognitive diversity are superpowers for organizations. When you have cognitively diverse people, they see problems in different ways. They see opportunities in different ways. And they will create different ways to engage with each other, to engage with customers, to engage with citizens, to engage with fellow employees to unlock new sources of value,” says McMullen.
“This is not about giving some group of people special privileges,” McMullen stresses, “It’s not about shifting privilege around. It’s about creating an environment where we can all take our masks off, and be our authentic selves at work. And the value that that is going to unlock is tremendous.”
Another prediction: By 2028, there will be more smart robots than frontline workers in manufacturing, retail and logistics.
Since COVID, we’ve already seen more and more jobs replaced by machines. Just think of your local supermarket check-out.
Gartner thinks it is realistic to start imagining that by 2028 robots might start out in the workforce, not just in a highly-advanced supply chain but “everywhere across our ecosystem.” Indeed, we need to start thinking about generative AI as a new user interface.
“Whether that interfaces at a terminal that I’m talking to, or whether that interface is in a robot that’s making my coffee for me, it’s going to become a new user interface.”
AI-Augmented Development is the use of AI technologies, such as generative AI and machine learning (ML), to aid software engineers in creating, testing and delivering applications. Cr: Gartner 
AI’s ability to create net new content (images, speech, text and more) and its widespread availability will democratize access to information and skills, making it one of the most disruptive trends of this decade. Cr: Gartner 
Industry Cloud Platforms address industry-relevant business outcomes by combining underlying SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services into a whole product offering with composable capabilities. Cr: Gartner
Generative AI will be a new machine-to-human interface and a new and increasingly important machine-to-machine interface.
By 2026, 30% of large companies will have a dedicated business unit, or sales channels to access fast growing machine customer markets, Gartner predicts.
When it comes to threats and risks, Gartner predicts that “mal-information” is going to become a multi front threat by 2028, by which time the enterprise will be spending $30 billion a year trying to combat it. What is mal-information? The analyst describes this term as “algorithmically groomed and targeted disinformation or even the truth which is out of context and designed to change mental models.”
Today, mal-information is a $78 billion threat, which is just “people to people mal-information.” AI-based mal-information “will cause your AI to have a hallucination or cause it to ingest data that causes it to hallucinate. And that has the potential to grow to enormous sums.”
McMullen concludes with a call to action. “I’m imploring you to take the decisions that you make today and into the future about generative AI very, very seriously because we are literally the last generation of managers who get to make those decisions,” he says.
After those decisions are made it will become a one-way door, “which will become very, very difficult to reverse.”
