Humanity’s greatest dream: artificial intelligence

In brief

• According to GWI, the share of people saying they had never heard of ChatGPT fell to 13% by September 2023.
• AI is seen as the next revolution after the Industrial Revolution, set to fundamentally change daily life and how we work.
• AI’s five areas of focus for the communications industry in 2024: insight, media, creativity and production, software, operations.

Since the 1950s, our dream has been to build a machine that can think and act like people, possessing humanity’s higher cognitive abilities all at once. We want a single machine capable of reasoning, thinking, using natural language, memory, abstraction, recognising objects and perception. Seen this way, AI is quite literally the greatest dream and project in human history.

Two or three years ago, AI meant little more in our lives than Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa. After ChatGPT launched, tools for image generation, natural language, object recognition and memory advanced so much within months that we saw a shift in why people use AI. As people began using it for heavy tasks such as generating original ideas and analysing text and data, the number using it for lighter tasks such as improving existing work also grew.

When GWI first surveyed this globally in February 2023, a few months after ChatGPT’s launch, two thirds of respondents had already heard of the tool, but fewer than half knew what ChatGPT actually was. By September 2023, the share saying they had never heard of ChatGPT had fallen to 13%. We rarely see such big changes in data over such short periods. It points to the truly disruptive nature of AI, as curiosity met real-world use.

AI’s rapid growth wasn’t the result of a social or political event. It came from people turning to the technology to experience this new era of digital transformation for themselves. As technological progress accelerated and met people’s needs, AI became the digital transformation topic we talked about most in 2023. Given the pace of development over the past few years, after the Industrial Revolution AI will be the next revolution to fundamentally change how people live day to day and how they work in many fields.

Five areas of focus for the communications industry in 2024

• Insight: It will turn everyone into an architect of client growth in support of all marketing strategies and plans, strengthening brands’ competitive advantage in designing successful strategies and getting the analysis right.
• Media: It will give clients data that helps them win faster and earlier across planning, buying and optimisation.
• Creativity and production: It will lead the way in creating personalised content at scale.
• Software: The best software and digitally enabled products will reach the market in days or weeks, not months.
• Operations: Operations and client management systems will be strengthened with speed, accuracy and efficiency.

Given the variety and potential of AI’s impact on the communications industry in 2024, there is no doubt that in the periods ahead this technology will accelerate the industry’s transformation by further optimising business processes and the customer experience.