Last week, I took a look back at what we learned about the global tech industry in 2023. But new years are a great time to look forward, and with that in mind here are my predictions of what will be the biggest stories in 2024.
Generative AI continues to expand
New releases of Chat-GPT, Bard, DALL-E and other tools will add new features and additional usability. Increasingly, Generative AI will become multi-modal, fusing text, speech, images and video. We’ll also see significant new entrants as Apple, Amazon and Samsung make a stronger market push to catch up with Microsoft (Open AI), Meta and Google. The initial hype associated with these tools will subside and be replaced by real-world and value-driven application.
Digital forensics rails to gain traction
Fake News and Russian content farms were the big stories last election cycle, and this year’s presidential election will fare similarly.
The unfortunate reality is that the technologies to generate deep fakes and spear-phishing style delivery of fabricated news are far superior to four years ago. With the US’s over-political and under-regulated environment and society’s current tendency to believe social media influencers ahead of rigorous journalists, I expect increasing distrust and further separation across demographic groups.
Digital assistants are the rage
The most hyped killer app of Generative AI tools is the digital assistant. People will seek out personalized AI assistants to help with travel and restaurant booking, calendar management, and healthcare and finance decisions. But the actual value delivery will underwhelm due to insufficient integration between tech and web platforms and a lack of published AI assistant specialized API’s. Assistants will be a huge story, but are still at least a year away from maturity.
Blood pressure rises
Smart watches are nearly ubiquitous, and smart rings and earbuds are rapidly growing sectors. But the industry has been stuck at heart rate, temperature and respiration monitoring for several years. 2024 marks the scale-up of reliable optical blood pressure monitoring. Valencell, right here in Raleigh, has been an innovator in this space, and their technology is one of the major reasons this sensing modality is poised to explode.
EVs move towards mainstream
A huge hurdle was cleared when the North American Charging Standard (NACS) was officially adopted by SAE. For society to fully shift to electric vehicles requires standardized infrastructure and SACS puts the US on that path. 2024 is the year that automakers will adopt this into their designs and significant federal funds for charge ports will deploy nationwide. Nearly every automaker has announced NACS compliant models for release in 2025. The need for EV subsidies is over, as the automotive market tips towards an all electric future.
AR and VR remain a year away
The release of the Apple Vision Pro is highly anticipated, and I expect Apple to take a significantly different approach to Meta and HTC. VR headsets have mostly focused on gaming, but content still lags far behind traditional consoles. Apple is more likely to focus on improving day-to-day kinds of digital activity, like enterprise efficiency improvement and integration of AR/VR goggles with smartphones and tablets. But the $4,000 price tag will relegate the tech to a niche market for another year.
Innovation takes advantage of unlicensed spectrum
Two segments that are most rapidly growing are smart agriculture and smart cities, each well positioned to take advantage of unlicensed spectrum. LoRa is extremely well suited to simple sensing applications, and wifi 6 is reaching mainstream for higher bandwidth video. Low cost, ease of adoption and multi-vendor equipment options are driving adoption. Meanwhile, the growth curve of 5G private networks continues to fall behind. Autonomous vehicles and drones create a compelling argument for 5G, but are still very much at the proof-of-concept stage. The Wifi 7 specification becomes final in 2024, but don’t expect deployment until 2025.
Software and hardware converge
For several years, I have talked about the importance of hardware in the data economy.
Hardware is where sensors are deployed, and in a world of real-time, data-driven automation, owning hardware is critical to value creation and market capture. Sensors, whether discrete like temperature and humidity or broad spectrum like cameras and microphones, are where data is born. But software – primarily through AI – is where we create value from all that sensor data.
The ability to modify and improve hardware over its lifecycle becomes increasingly important. I expect more devices to utilize FPGA’s (field programmable gate array devices) to be able to not only upgrade software on devices, but to reconfigure the microchips that are the brains of hardware. This extends the life of hardware, even in a rapidly changing tech environment. I’ve seen little discussion of increasing US FPGA production capabilities, with the CHIPS Act announcements so far mostly related to electric vehicles and batteries. But I anticipate that to change as we move into 2024.
Smart cities graduate to smart regions
2023 was an inflection point in smart city maturity. We have finally reached a point where even small, rural communities have recognized the need to digitally transform. The next phase of this industry is to take the first baby steps towards standardization. We will see this begin through multiple proximate local governments working together on data sharing projects. In fact, this has already begun across the Triangle and should be a center-stage discussion at the Smart Cities Connect Conference, a national event that comes to Raleigh this spring.
Agriculture is the new manufacturing
Manufacturing was the OG for real-time data. Yield, throughput, quality control and consistency were all manageable in the highly controlled environment of the factory floor. No industry is seeding analogous methods more aggressively than agriculture. Plant and play sensors, easily deployed mesh networks and ultra-low-cost AI are fertilizing growth – puns most definitely intended.
