Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI) If You’re Planning to Transform the Workplace

READ MORE: Predictions 2024: Media And Advertising (Forrester)

The media industry will regain confidence in 2024, fueled by the rise of generative AI and stabilizing advertising revenue, according to industry analyst Forrester. Google, Meta, and TikTok in particular are poised for a strong 2024.

In its “Predictions 2024: Media And Advertising” report, the analyst foresees that generative AI “will transform Google into the next Google.” It explains that as Google harnesses GenAI, it will help the company sustain dominance as the number one search engine. Forrester conducted a survey with its ConsumerVoices Market Research Online Community and found that 73% of online adults would rely on Google to verify suspect responses from ChatGPT.

“In 2024, Google will leverage its credibility and commercialize its C4 data set to deepen its moat as the crawler and repository of reliable information,” Forrester states.

It predicts that TikTok will gain the lion’s share of linear TV budgets for Gen Z-minded marketers. Citing research that 86% of B2C marketing executives in the US are prioritizing better ways to reach Gen Zs and Millennials, it adds that these audiences are spending their entertainment time on “nonpremium video and gaming environments,” with around 40% of young adults in the US and the UK saying that they’re on TikTok constantly.

In an effort to connect with Gen Z, Chips Ahoy already moved most of its linear TV budget to social and digital channels. TikTok, not TV and CTV, will dominate media budgets for marketers trying to reach this influential audience.

READ MORE: Why Chips Ahoy’s linear TV budget is crumbling in the face of new digital options (Digiday)

Enter the Era of Intentional AI

AI dominates Forrester’s list of trends and predictions. The real question is will GenAI and AI in general live up to the massive amount of hype we’ve seen to date?

Unsurprisingly, Forrester’s answer is yes. 2024 will be another banner year for AI overall, it states, ushering in a new era of “intentional AI,” where gimmicks and technical experimentation give way to more focused and strategic initiatives.

This trend is already underway. Forrester says 67% of enterprises are embedding GenAI into their overall AI strategy.

“Every organization right now is asking themselves, how they can use AI to improve their business,” said senior analyst Andrew Hewitt in an accompanying podcast, “Predictions 2024: Where Will AI Go Next?”

“And I think the overall consensus is, that they want to be able to use AI in a way that’s very personalized to their specific business and allows them to drive outcomes for their business.”

While that is certainly the end goal for many organizations, Forrester also found that many are struggling to put that together. As a result of that, what it is starting to see that organizations are having to contend with a new concept, Bring your own AI (BYOAI). In other words, employees bring their own consumer versions of AI tools.

“Of course, the most popular is ChatGPT and using that in different parts of their work,” Hewitt said. “What’s ultimately happening is that while organizations are striving to provide that kind of corporate sanctioned AI capability or develop that strategy, they’re not able to do it fast enough. That brings in the consumer oriented services that we believe many employees are going to be using over the course of the next year.”

Forrester’s formal prediction is that in 2024 60% of workers will use their own AI to perform their job and tasks. That’s more than half of the workforce using some form of AI to do a substantive part of their job.

Added analyst Kim Herrington, “That could be a generative AI system or could also mean AI that’s embedded in an application that maybe isn’t sanctioned by the business or that that employee owns themselves. We predict that 60% of workers are going to actually bring their own AI similar to the moving around, bring your own device, and use that for their work over the next 12 months.”

Herrington went on to say that employees will use those tools to automate big portions of their job, whether that’s content generation or summarization of articles or decision support or using it in a sales scenario.

“We foresee that organizations or employees specifically, are going to be successful and improving their productivity over the next 12 months. At the same time, it also introduces a lot of risks from a legal perspective, from a security perspective and from a privacy perspective.

“We’re probably going to see some big blunders from organizations in terms of unsanctioned use of AI buildings by the workforce, leading to some negative business impact, whether that’s a privacy violation, a security infringement, or legal jeopardy.”

Ultimately, that will end up driving organizations towards corporate sanctioned AI capabilities, Forrester argues. “While they’ll definitely build their own policies to manage ‘bring your own AI’ in the workplace, ultimately, it’s going to push them towards developing and delivering a corporate sanctioned version of AI that the workforce can use without jeopardizing security management or legality of the overall AI system itself,” Herrington added.

The rapidly growing and widespread use of AI in the workplace also require new training programs for professionals. Forrester predicts that 60% of data and analytics professionals 60% will get prompt engineering training in 2024. Prompt engineering is the practice of creating and refining instructions given to an AI model to get the desired responses.

Yet only 33% of US and UK Data and Analytics employees say that their organizations currently provide training on how best to communicate with chatbots or intelligent agents via prompts.

“In order to capitalize on AI, not only are businesses going to have to fund AI developments, but they’re also going to have to budget for AI search, training and creation of those different prompts,” said Harrington, as well as budget for data communicators to “evangelize the AI tooling” and act as analytics translators to help people adopt those new technologies.

Deepfakes Dominate Misinformation

With national elections coming up in the US and around the world in 2024, there’s increased concern about generative AI’s role in influencing elections. Deepfake ads will become the primary accelerant for election misinformation, said senior analyst Mo Allibhai, although he noted there was a high bar for bad actors to extend their reach.

“Setting up a publisher website, and then being able to actually be admitted to an Ad Exchange and then drawing audiences to that publisher website.. It’s pretty expensive as an endeavor.”

The good news is that Forrester think that generative AI-created disinformation will fail to alter the course of any national elections because the real challenge lies in the distribution of disinformation and not the creation of it.