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Pete Hanlon is the Chief Technology Officer for Moneypenny – a business on the frontline of client care, handling calls, live chats and outsourced switchboard services for more than 21,000 businesses across the world.
Renowned for harnessing ground-breaking technology and extraordinary people so that businesses can capture every lead, improve client experience, support hybrid-work behaviours and compete in a 24/7 world – Moneypenny always has one eye on new technologies and how they might shape, improve and change its outsourced solutions.
Here Hanlon shares his top tech predictions for businesses in 2023:
#1 Computers Will Be More Creative
2022 saw the release of image-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as DALL-E 2 from OpenAI, Imagen from Google and Stable Diffusers from Huggingface which can generate photo realistic images from a simple text prompt. For example, the prompt ‘Darth Vader riding a bicycle in the style of Claude Monet’ will create exactly that. The AI isn’t searching the internet for existing images and pasting them together – instead it’s creating a completely new image based on its general understanding of what Darth Vader and a bicycle look like, and Claude Monet’s painting style. So, the AI is creating something completely new – a unique image.
For 2023 the field will move to the next level. Going from generating static images, to 3D models and video based on just a text description. I also predict that AI based music generation will move forward massively. While there have been systems able to do this for some time, I think 2023 will be a year where we see it improve to the point where you may actually enjoy listening to it.
#2 Lawyers Will Benefit From AI
Having the ability to generate images, videos, and music by simply telling an AI what to do, gives everyone the tools to be creative. Producing music for marketing campaigns, designing a logo, creating a meme, or images for power point presentations, become quick and relatively trivial tasks. However, the technology is evolving quickly and there are big question marks over Intellectual Property and the ownership of the created content. The common response now is that AI art can’t be copywritten, which is fine if the content isn’t being used commercially. But it could be a problem if it was used to create imagery for a movie or a marketing campaign. And although an AI image can’t be copywritten, if you create an exact copy of the Mona Lisa using an AI and you use it commercially, you will be sued. I expect some of the edge cases to be addressed over the coming years, but one thing is certain, there will be lawsuits, and lawyers will benefit from this advancement in technology.
#3 AI Will Become Even More Explainable
As AI systems and Deep Learning models become ever more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging to explain how systems make predictions. Deep learning models are often trained on billions of data items. However, if we want to understand why a complex model gave a particular prediction, it’s almost impossible to do in a way that is understandable to humans.
To trust AIs that drive our cars and help run our lives, we need to understand the processes they went through to make a prediction. This is a big area of research by all the large tech companies and many research groups, and I expect it to improve significantly.
#4 Digital Transformation Will Accelerate
The world is changing rapidly, and all businesses should understand what those changes mean for them. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, virtual and augmented reality, cloud computing, blockchain, and super-fast network protocols like 5G, are commonplace now. It’s more important than ever that businesses understand how they can embrace state of the art technologies as part of their BAU (business as usual), helping them to automate tasks, make better decisions and align their products and services more closely with customer needs.
#5 Outsourcing Will Increase
The pandemic has taught us to focus on what we do best and to bring in experts when we need specific solutions. Businesses that adopt this model can grow, innovate, and pivot faster, which makes them more competitive in the constantly changing and evolving business environment we all operate in. Business Process Outsourcing is a trend that will continue to grow.
Technology is not a field that stands still. There are always advances and ground-breaking achievements; that’s what makes it such a phenomenal industry to work in. Business needs to embrace this, get excited by the potential, and harness its power to thrive in 2023 and beyond.
