List of top AI-powered strategic technology trends released

Gartner Inc on Tuesday released a list of "top 10 strategic technology trends" that organizations need to explore in 2024, with over half of them related to artificial intelligence.

The trends include democratized generative AI making models accessible to workers worldwide; AI trust, risk and security management; AI-augmented development and intelligent applications; and machine customers, which refers to nonhuman economic actors that can autonomously negotiate and purchase goods and services in exchange for payment.

By 2026, Gartner predicts that over 80 percent of enterprises will have used generative AI APIs (application programming interfaces) and models or deployed generative AI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5 percent in early 2023.

Some Chinese companies, who are on the front lines of the AI industry, also issued their AI results this week.

For instance, Baidu Inc released business AI analysis and intelligence tools on Tuesday with an upgraded generative AI model. It will "reshape all workforce and people's daily life," the firm said.

The multi-model AI techs, including text-to-image, will be used to deal with huge volumes of documents, which is one of the hottest research trends in the industry, Guo Fengjun, research director of Intsig, told the Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision.

Executives of the Shanghai-based Intsig, Tencent, Meituan and university researchers shared their latest AI techs and trends at the conference.

Other trends Gartner released covered cloud, sustainable technology and security.