The future of AI requires sustainability
The artificial intelligence (AI) market is rife with flashy tools claiming to magically evaporate your business problems. We spoke to current industry leaders who warned that not all that glitters is gold.
The generative AI market is expected to reach approximately $1,005.07 billion by 2034. A significant contributor to the growth of generative AI is the rise of agentic AI, which offers the tempting prospect of automated co-workers performing tasks with minimal human input.
The generative boom is part of a greater trend in AI, where AI startups throw shiny tools at businesses, but fail to get to the crux of addressing real business problems.
Our in-house tech journalist spoke to Dawie Krause, Principal Enterprise Architect at MGM Resorts International, and it was confirmed that quick-fix solutions do not get to the crux of business problems.
For example, not every use-case is suited to real-time. According to Krause, updating a customer’s lifetime value or segment profile can be done hourly or daily without affecting outcomes. Additionally, real-time data can add noise when decisions actually require aggregation over time (for example, fraud detection is more accurate when you evaluate patterns, not just one-off anomalies).
AI products that market ‘real-time’ as the solution to all problems do not possess the nuance necessary to remain sustainable. Krause pointed out that real-time systems are significantly more complex and expensive to run (due to streaming infrastructure, low-latency Service Level Agreements, etc.), so applying them to each and every use-case is simply unmaintainable.
It has been predicted that, much like the market explosion following the dot-com boom, many of the AI tools we see today will soon disappear. The products that will survive history are those that consider the future of AI – where businesses prioritise highly applicable solutions that generate value, rather than quick-fix solutions that don’t evolve as new problems arise.
