Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024.  Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Keep your eyes on SMBs, regulations, AGI, and AI assistants in the year ahead

There's no doubt that AI is transforming business at an accelerating pace.

As we look ahead, leaders at CallRail shared predictions of AI's largest business impact and trends in 2024.

SMBs will be better positioned to adopt AI

Over the past year, the race of companies trying to cash in on the AI "gold rush" has primarily been large enterprises. In the year ahead, however, Marc Ginsberg, CEO of CallRail, believes we will witness small and medium-sized businesses across industries like legal, home services, and healthcare increasingly turning to AI solutions as well.

"Small and midsize businesses don't have the same tech stack constraints as large companies who need to integrate into complex platforms with a long list of competing priorities. SMBs have the technical and business process agility to experiment with these evolving capabilities."

"Human-assisted AI will also be critical as we train models to drive better responses. Executing this at the scale and focus of an SMB will be less time consuming and have greater oversight than the complexity of a large enterprise."

AI will further transform content strategy and creation for businesses

How we create high-performing content for our markets will evolve dramatically. We will continue to expand the use of AI writing tools to create content that is relevant and useful. With Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) looming, we will see content strategy evolve to focus more on personalized and transactional pieces, leaving AI-generated answers to cover the informational, traditionally top-of-funnel topics.

"AI isn't just changing how we create, but what and why as well." said Emily Popson, Head of Growth Marketing at CallRail. "The need for differentiated, down funnel content will force marketers to use AI not only to craft but also to provide input. We will increasingly utilize AI to extract and distill unique insights about buyers from our existing data sets such as sales calls and customer feedback and use that to optimize our AI assisted content creation processes."

It will no longer be enough (or worthwhile) to create content that explains your category or basic service offerings, but, rather, the value will be in deeply understanding your customer and covering specialized topics that get to the heart of their needs. The proliferation of content, if done correctly, will make it much easier for buyers to obtain the most relevant, customized, and useful content and solutions they need. "Over the next year, we're likely to see SGE and other changes in search, when paired with both AI content tools and data analysis, actually make significant increases in content quality possible. As a result, this could be the single largest change driving broad content quality improvements that we have witnessed in a long time."

AI regulation will follow a wake up call

While the federal government ponders more meaningful regulation of AI, it will become a higher  priority for many policymakers as use cases and the underlying data exponentially grow.  It will be important for companies to self-regulate today and be sure to review the inputs and outputs of AI models.

Ryan Johnson, Chief Product Officer at CallRail, anticipates that more tangible regulations will take place following a significant event taking place on the horizon - one that can only be described as a "watershed" moment.

"Historically, this is the kind of stuff that happens in the US. There's an event that is likely to be a wake up call and have a sweeping impact not only on national regulations, including those outlined in President Biden's recent executive order, but also on the international stage as the AI industry braces for shifts."

AI-powered software will continue to emerge

This year, building AI-based software became easier and more accessible than ever before - from APIs that offer access to powerful, pre-trained models to drag-and-drop tooling that allows you to easily transfer lean. According to Kristin Marsicano, VP of Engineering at CallRail, the sheer volume of choices for vendors offering AI-powered solutions means it will be crucial that buyers can truly pinpoint the products that can benefit their businesses.

"In 2024, we will see a proliferation of choices, which will be incredible but will also make it more difficult to determine the signal from the noise. Selecting AI-based tools that provide real value will require knowing what to look for and cutting through the buzzwords."

Marsicano highlights that one way to cut through the noise as buyers evaluate AI-powered tools is to explore the vendor's approach to AI. For instance, she suggests determining the principles a vendor applies to guide their incorporation of AI into their products. The true north star should be to only include AI as a solution if the technology truly provides a more valuable experience or set of capabilities for the customer or end user.

AGI will advance in the year ahead

While there's no shortage of speculation around when artificial general intelligence, or AGI, might become a reality, Johnson thinks it could be as early as next year. This will be a big stride in technology innovation as most AI learns by being fed information by humans, where AGI would be able to determine when it doesn't know something and seek out new information for itself.

"I think we will see the first AGI ‘mind blowing' technology hit the market commercially in 2024. It's not clear exactly when or where it will be coming from, but its introduction will undoubtedly be a game-changer, igniting a new era in AI development and application."

His colleague Jason Tatum, Vice President of Product at CallRail, has a slightly different theory. "AGI is very far away from becoming a reality, but it's closer than ever. What we have today in LLMs is a blurry copy of human intelligence. It's pretty good, and it can do some amazing things to improve your business. But can an LLM invent a working theory of economics or a vaccine to fight a pandemic? Humans can! I believe we've made huge leaps in the past few years, but I don't believe any of us know how long we're from true creative genius."

Expect to see AI assistants become more common in the workplace

For some companies, AI is already transforming the workplace at a startling pace. It is changing how businesses operate, how they interact with their customers and how work gets done . In 2024 though, Johnson believes that AI assistants will be one of the biggest advancements to become commonplace in work environments.

"OpenAI's latest release, which allows the development of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) as the first-ever AI assistants, is indicative of this trend. By the end of the year, we will likely see a widespread adoption of at least one AI assistant, as these digital companions become integral to our daily professional lives - especially in tech."  Assistants to help analyze data, write SEO content, and help with IT support will become commonplace before we know it.

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