Dr Clare Walsh, Director of Education at the Institute of Analytics, discusses which industries will see big shifts in the rollout of new disruptive technology.
For all the noise around AI, a few studies released at the end of the year showed a very different story to one of the untamed machines marching forward inevitably. After a scorching hot AI summer over the past year, many feel we are headed for a more winter-like period whilst disruptive technology embeds into our everyday lives rather than shocking us.
The first sign of a potential technology shift was an update in October on the much-miscited Frey and Osborne study from 2013. Ten years later, the controversial figure of around 47% of roles – not jobs but roles within jobs – is at risk in the US labour market.
The study reached its tenth anniversary, and that major shift has not happened. In fairness, the original study was more cautious than its readers and acknowledged that, while machines could potentially do many jobs, society decides what technologies will be adopted.
Despite the hype and fears of the previous year, we are very much at the stage where only a handful of early adopters are actually using the new AI technologies in their organisations. According to a study from the ONS, only around 15% of businesses have a policy of using Large Language Models. It may be that there has been a challenge in identifying use cases. Those technologies that produce spectacularly failed images on social media feeds are just too unpredictable to risk in many businesses.
Which industries will see disruptive technology rollouts?
Adoption and rollout of disruptive technology will continue to be confined to the companies that know how to get benefits and use them, and some fields, in particular, have a plan in mind.
Top of those is medicine and the pharmaceuticals industry. Exscientia, an Oxford-based company, has the first AI-generated drug in the world reaching clinical trials. Having cracked the code for protein unfolding, Deep Mind, the UK’s main AI research centre is working on medical applications with this groundbreaking technology. Protein unfolding is the missing link to how DNA links together to become a protein. AI is also narrowing the hunt for substances with anti-bacterial and curative properties, greatly reducing the costs of identifying potential substances.
This may be the year we see more breakthroughs in the much-promised augmented reality. The protocols for sharing information in a standardised way were agreed on at the end of 2022, so companies have had time to build on that potential. Agreement over how to render concepts such as weight or gravity means that instead of being a cottage industry, with each producer working to their own set of rules, it would be possible to share VR or AR files between different models, just as it makes little difference today if you want to access a website on a Mac or a PC.
In banking, if the long-awaited digital pound is launched, it could significantly impact how we spend our money. As with all disruptive technology, it depends on a plausible use case being found, but with digital currencies, one rather persuasive use affects many.
Suppose the UK government can agree on a standardised exchange rate policy with other countries. In that case, there will be no reason for holidaymakers to pay the fee on foreign currency exchanges that banks charge. For some, that may be enough of a use case.
This bank-free digital currency bypasses the need for a contractual agreement with a commercial bank to enjoy the benefits of making online transactions while still enjoying the benefits of a fiat-backed currency. Even if we do not get digital currency, increasing international agreements on data exchanges across borders creates opportunities for the movement of money.
Developments in environmental technologies will, of course, also take centre stage. The Global Environmental Reporting kicked off last year and now reaches more industries. With more transparency around the environment, even trends that appear to be on the wane, such as the move to plant-based diets, might pick up again, with clear reporting on the health impacts of plants and, say, the negative environmental impact of the global meat industry, which produces around 60% of greenhouse gases. That’s more than the entire transport network.
We could enter a new age of more targeted farming in agriculture. If the focus for the last few decades has been on scaling up farming to prevent famine in the face of unprecedented population growth, then in the coming years, we will see new farming focused on nutrition per hectare rather than calories. Tractors trained using Machine Learning and computer vision can now identify weeds from crops at a height of just less than 1cm and deliver one drop of pesticide or fertiliser, depending on the plant. The result is bigger and healthier crops, a move away from unhealthy mono-crop fields and a 95% reduction in chemical usage in farming.
At the more exciting end of the spectrum of changes we could see in the year ahead, you might want to pencil in planning your space policy at some point over the next year. As far-fetched as it may sound, the cost of launching satellites into space has dropped spectacularly over the past year. This means it is now feasible to bring data coverage to areas that have historically required you to pull over, wave your phone, and hope for a signal.
Overall, this year seems unlikely to produce as many shocks in disruptive technology as in the years gone by. We are more likely to see companies reviewing their approach to digitisation and looking for sustainable ways of integrating technologies into their long-term strategies. The move to greater automation will continue, but, on the whole, it will likely be in roles so routine that few people will object to those tasks being taken away.
