Let’s make AI boring again. That’s the clarion call recently issued by Melissa Heikkilä of MIT Technology Review, who states that while putting AI in charge of life-or-death decisions is controversial and nerve-wracking, it may serve us well to simply run day-to-day tasks or activities behind the scenes.
Companies might find that AI tools “are better suited for mundane, low-risk applications than solving humanity’s biggest problems,” she writes. “Applying AI in, for example, productivity software such as Excel, email, or word processing might not be the sexiest idea, but compared to warfare it’s a relatively low-stakes application, and simple enough to have the potential to actually work as advertised. Hopefully, soon we’ll forget we’re interacting with AI at all.”
Perhaps “boring AI” is too boring of a term for this under-the-covers capability — ambient AI may be a bit of a snazzier term.
We are getting to the point in which ambient AI will surround us, delivering insights, course correcting, and running systems without the need for us to think about it. Business users and the general public will not need to bother to learn to develop algorithms and train large language models — but they are increasingly employing AI in their everyday work and lives anyway.
We are seeing plenty of evidence of this in the workplace, which is taking the form of dedicated “AI assistants,” says David Wong, chief product officer at Thomson Reuters. “AI is becoming an undercover operating system for professionals, particularly when it comes to using the technology for research and idea generation.”
Over the coming year, he predicts, “I expect to see AI assistants integrated more into day-to-day work.” The outcome will be “tasks which previously took hours will now take seconds. Soon, workers will not even realize they are using AI to get their desired results – it will become second nature.”
Tax and legal professionals, for example, “ will have an AI assistant that will augment – not replace – their work,” Wong illustrates. “The AI assistant will be reliable, trusted, and by their side wherever they work.”
Expect to see — or not see — ambient AI “automating numerous traditionally time-consuming tasks such as tracking growth and converting leads,” Matt Bentley, chief data scientist of Scorpion, points out. This will “help business owners to allocate more time to address user needs in a natural and efficient manner. Users may not be consciously aware of AI-driven processes unfolding in the background.”
Likewise, AI is increasingly around us in the world at large. “We will see AI abstracted so consumers don’t even know they are using it,” says Kyle Tuberson, chief technology officer for ICF. “This is the trajectory of how all good technology evolves: the end-user experience is so seamless that the technology becomes virtually invisible, working effortlessly in the background.”
Consider the rise of “AI-enabled autonomous transportation,” says David Ly, CEO and founder of Iveda. “I predict that 2024 will be the year we start seeing a lot more real-world tests and implementations around the world, specifically with use cases in logistics and delivery vehicles and Uber-like services. In the future, AI will be everywhere, affecting how we operate, but people might not notice how it works.”
Expect to also not see ambient AI “seamlessly integrating into everyday applications,” Ly emphasizes. “Google Gemini and Microsoft Bing and Edge are indicative of AI seamlessly powering insights, making its presence less conspicuous in our daily interactions. “
Of course, ambient AI has been developing behind the scenes for several years already. “When we think about it, AI is already an under-the-covers technology to the general public,” Bentley says. “So many applications are already leveraging various types of AI models and the people using them were largely none the wiser about. Think search engines or apps on a mobile device.”
AI is evolving to the point in which it is becoming “a part of the fabric of our everyday lives,” says Tuberson, “We will see leading AI companies improve the end user experience so that generative AI evolves from a standalone entity to a behind-the-scenes component powering various technologies.”
