Tech Trends 2024: Culturally aware GenAI, femtech, cybersecurity, deepfakes

Industry leaders say technology will continue to change our lives in the new year and the biggest theme that is expected to emerge is the application of generative AI in different sectors

Cloud technologies, machine learning, and generative AI (GenAI) have become more accessible, impacting nearly every aspect of our lives from writing emails to developing software, and even detecting cancer at an early stage, according to Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of Amazon.com. Vogels, responsible for shaping the long-term technology vision of the world's largest online retailer, said the coming years would be filled with innovation in areas designed to democratize access to technology and help us keep up with the pace of everyday life—and it starts with GenAI. It is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data.

In his blog, All Things Distributed, Vogels has listed out tech predictions for 2024 and beyond. He believes that Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on culturally diverse data will gain a more nuanced understanding of human experience and complex societal challenges. This cultural fluency promises to make GenAI more accessible to users worldwide. He said that culture provides rules and guidelines that inform and govern our behaviours and beliefs—and this contract changes depending on where we are and who we are with. At the same time, these differences can sometimes result in confusion and misinterpretation. In Japan, he said it is considered a sign of enjoyment to slurp your soup as you eat noodles, but it is considered impolite in other cultures. At a traditional wedding in India, Vogels said a bride may wear an intricately designed and colourful lehenga, while in the Western world, the tradition is a white dress. And in Greece, it is customary to spit on the dress for good luck. As humans, we are used to working across cultures, and as such, we can contextualize this information, synthesize it, adjust our understanding and respond appropriately.

“In the coming years, culture will play a crucial role in how technologies are designed, deployed, and consumed; its effects will be most evident in generative AI,” said Vogels.

For LLM-based systems to reach a worldwide audience, Vogels said they need to achieve the type of cultural fluency that comes instinctively to humans. Common Crawl, which has been used to train many LLMs, is roughly 46 per cent English. And an even greater percentage of the content available—regardless of language—is culturally Western (skewing significantly towards the United States). In the past few months, non-Western LLMs have started to emerge: Jais, trained on Arabic and English data, Yi-34B, a bilingual Chinese/English model, and Japanese-large-lm, trained on an extensive Japanese web corpus.

“These are signs that culturally accurate non-Western models will open up generative AI to hundreds of millions of people, with impacts ranging far and wide, from education to medical care,” said Vogels.

Vogels also believes that women's healthcare has reached an inflection point as 'femtech' investment surges, care goes hybrid, and an abundance of data unlocks improved diagnoses and patient outcomes. The rise of femtech will not only benefit women but lift the entire healthcare system.

Common needs like menstrual care and menopause treatment have historically been treated as taboo. Women have been excluded from trials and research, and their outcomes are typically worse than men. On average, women are diagnosed later than men for many diseases, and women are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.

“At AWS (Amazon Web Services), we’ve been working closely with women-led start-ups and have seen first-hand the growth in femtech,” said Vogels. “With increased access to capital, technologies like machine learning, and connected devices designed specifically for women, we are at the precipice of an unprecedented shift, not only in the way women's care is perceived but how it's administered.”

Companies like Tia, Elvie, and Embr Labs are showing the immense potential of leveraging data and predictive analytics to provide individualized care and meet patients where they’re comfortable—at home and on the go.

Women in rural areas and historically underserved regions will have an easier time connecting to obstetrician-gynecologists, mental health professionals, and other specialists through apps and telehealth platforms. Smart tampon systems like the one NextGen Jane is developing will let women establish profiles of their uterine health and identify potential genomic markers of disease, which can be seamlessly shared with their clinicians.

Vogels also believes that AI assistants will evolve from basic code generators into teachers and tireless collaborators who provide support throughout the software development lifecycle. They will explain complex systems in simple language, suggest targeted improvements, and take on repetitive tasks, allowing developers to focus on the parts of their work that have the most impact.

2023 has also been an exciting year for retail tech. AI and ML models have played a crucial role in driving supply chain automation. These range from powering inventory management, last-mile delivery, and predictive analytics to improving upon the ability to anticipate customer needs.

“For instance, this holiday season, we enhanced the AI embedded within Walmart’s inventory management system to provide a more accurate view of demand and better ensure customers and members get items when, where, and how they want,” said Balu Chaturvedula, senior vice president and country head, Walmart Global Tech, the technology arm of the world's largest retailer. “Our ML model, for example, can recognise a hot-selling toy in a particular region and automatically send more items to those stores.”

Predictive analytics is helping Walmart’s drivers complete more deliveries in less time. At the same time, AR (Augmented Reality) has been helping customers visualize how items will look in their everyday lives. It is doing this while supporting store associate's ability to manage inventory more effectively.

Looking ahead, Chaturvedula said that emerging tech will further propel data-driven decision-making, enable more natural interactions for customers while shopping, and increase productivity for the workforce through automation. He believes GenAI will transform the way the world shops. Be it GenAI-powered search, virtual assistants to automating tasks for developers—there are exciting possibilities to look out for. Quantum computing will also be key to fuelling operational efficiencies and personalization in retail.

“And as technology continues to advance more rapidly than ever, it is important that we reinforce our commitment to using tech responsibly and in a manner that is safe, transparent, and ethical to all,” said Chaturvedula.

According to Sindhu Gangadharan, senior vice president and managing director, SAP Labs India; vice chairperson at technology industry body Nasscom, GenAI is being embedded in everyday tools to radically transform how people work.

“In 2024, business leaders will look beyond the industry buzz for solutions that deliver real-life, AI-based use cases,” said Gangadharan. “GenAI for business will move from hype to reality in 2024.”

Gangadharan said that businesses have always required relevant and reliable business results. That means they’ll need to find ways of combining GenAI with their business-specific data. These data are notoriously complex and often sit in multiple systems, so there is a high risk of losing valuable context when they are extracted and combined.

Since GenAI is only as valuable as the data it draws from, Gangadharan said companies that can best combine their own business data with GenAI to provide the strongest context to the models will have a significant edge on the competition.

The new year presents a massive and exciting opportunity for purpose-driven organizations to better serve their communities as we advance in ways of using AI, said Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive officer, Salesforce India.

“But adopting this technology will require funding and expertise,” said Bhattacharya. “AI will also help fight the climate crisis. We do have some solutions — namely renewable energy sources like solar and wind, as well as EVs — to help.”

On the GenAI front, Bhattacharya expects it will hypercharge efficiency. We will all get familiar with the term “semantic query” and advancement in the semantic query (essentially a question written in a ‘human’ language that then gets translated into machine language). This is expected to dramatically change customer service. Businesses can provide quick and meaningful, hyper-personalized service with AI using text, images, videos, and audio for search. “Throughout 2024, semantic query will become a cornerstone for AI,” said Bhattacharya.

She said that business leaders have a responsibility to ensure that their teams are equipped with the right resources and support to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities that AI offers.

Also, the rise of ChatGPT (chatbot developed by OpenAI) and LLMs means that novice hackers will be 100X more prevalent in 2024. Novice and expert alike will leverage them to run more multi-layered attacks faster, according to Ashish Tandon, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Indusface. He said that cybersecurity practitioners will also utilise AI, ML, and LLM as a force multiplier to thwart these attacks, especially in a market where there is a shortage of talent and budgets for the office of the chief information security officer.

Another big trend that is expected to emerge in 2024 is deepfakes, which are realistic yet fabricated videos and audio created by AI algorithms. The models and technology have become so good and easily accessible, that anyone can create malicious content using deep fake models. “It is a concern,” said Yatharth Saraf, director of machine learning at homegrown social media platforms ShareChat and Moj, in an interview. “But there is also a lot of work related to addressing the problem of deepfakes happening in the industry,” said Saraf.