Accenture’s latest report, which was unveiled during the recently concluded Accenture Technology Vision 2023 event, shows that generative AI and other rapidly evolving technologies are precursors to the new norm for businesses where physical and digital worlds converge.
With the theme “When Atoms Meet Bits: The Foundations of Our New Reality,” the event explores the technology trends that will drive the convergence of the physical and digital as businesses are looking into reinventing how they operate and engage in the modern landscape.
“The next decade will be defined by three mega technology trends: cloud, metaverse and AI, which collectively will collapse the distance of our digital and physical worlds. While generative AI will have far-reaching impact, leaders must dive in now to achieve its full promise, as it will require significant investments in data, people, and customizing foundation models to meet organizations’ unique needs,” said Paul Daugherty, group chief executive of Accenture Technology.
The event discussions revolved around four trends that are set to unlock the new enterprise landscape: enhancing human capabilities with generative AI as its co-pilot, the ability to authenticate digital users and assets in traversing across the digital and physical worlds, modernizing data foundations and breaking down data silos to exponentially improve AI, and generating feedback loop between science and technology.
According to the report, as much as 40% of all working hours will be supported or augmented by language-based AI. It also highlights that 98% of business leaders agree that AI foundation models will play an important role in their organization’s strategies over the next three to five years.
Language-based AI is largely considered as the next big breakthrough in AI, transforming industries and spawning new multi-billion-dollar startups. Accenture has established a company-wide team called “Generative AI and Large Language Model (LLM) Center of Excellence,” which brings together 1,600 professionals dedicated to generative AI.
In Accenture’s in-depth study of generative AI/LLM, 98% of senior executives believe AI will spark significant creativity and innovation, and 95% said it will usher in a new era of enterprise intelligence. Until today, Accenture continues to take a systematic look across the enterprise landscape to identify technology trends with the highest likelihood of disrupting businesses and industries.
“Over the years, enterprises and individuals have taken many steps to create their presence in the digital space, consciously moving back and forth between physical reality and the digital ones they created. We believe the time has come to change that. The next wave of business transformation will erase the demarcation between those worlds to fuse them into a new reality,” added Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.
In 2024, Accenture predicts that a new generation of virtual assistants will be built with transformer-based foundation models, with the increased adoption attributed to more sophisticated and natural language capabilities. The company also expects that new search engines next year will emerge, featuring foundation-model-based “quick answer” services that give users direct and thorough answers to queries.
