AI in 2024: Intuit Leaders on Possibilities and Pitfalls

Widespread adoption of generative AI is now in its second year, and the wow factor has given way to a deeper understanding of its pros and cons. The technology has been in the hands of the public, innovators, and threat actors long enough for predictions about its future to be rooted in experience.

Three of Intuit’s technology leaders look to the year ahead and share their perspectives on what AI presents and how organizations will need to both seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges.

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Ashok Srivastava, Chief Data Officer 

LLMs will assist generative AI to reason more and hallucinate less

AI is moving beyond the large language model (LLM) text world of ChatGPT and the landscapes of Midjourney to large multimodal models (LMMs)—systems that can reason across different media types. This is opening up new types of applications and possibilities, such as image-based inventory or virtual product support assistants for small businesses, and may help to ground future AI systems on more real-world examples that mitigate the potential of hallucination. We expect many more applications over the next 12 months, and as generative AI learns with sound, vision, and other senses, the near future may bring with it AI systems that can distinguish between reality and fiction. 

More organizations will jump on the AI operating system bandwagon 

Generative AI operating systems will receive more attention and investment in the year ahead. AI operating systems are the interface between artificial intelligence and everything else, from the engineers and designers leveraging generative AI tools, to the robotic systems being trained by generative AI to mimic human behavior and action in the physical world. Because of the well-documented high stakes of widespread AI adoption, more emphasis will be placed on the importance for organizations to build operating systems that can act as an intermediary between AI and everything else, as more companies and public sector organizations embrace advanced AI technology at scale.

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Atticus Tysen, Chief Information Security Officer

Democratization of AI will be a double-edged sword for cybersecurity

While the democratization of AI shows great promise, its widespread availability poses an unprecedented challenge for cybersecurity. AI will evolve to generate specific, targeted attacks to become continuous, ubiquitous threats against businesses, individuals, and the infrastructure they rely upon. Furthermore, it will be a race against the threat actors to design resilient systems and protections. Without continual vigilance, the risk of successful hacks becoming commonplace and wreaking havoc in the near future is a clear and present danger.

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Elise Houlik, Chief Privacy Officer

Privacy professionals will need to rapidly upskill for the AI era

As personal data becomes more valuable, and AI further permeates nearly every sector across the globe, the definition of today’s privacy professional and the skill sets required will need to rapidly evolve. More than ever, privacy teams will need to work closely with system architects, AI scientists and engineers, cybersecurity teams, product developers, privacy engineers, and other technology disciplines to ensure platforms are processing personal data correctly and using that data in the most responsible way possible. Complicating matters is a fragmented and challenging global AI regulatory landscape, which places greater urgency on the need for continuous upskilling from a data privacy perspective as global frameworks come into sharper focus.

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Whatever 2024 may bring to the realm of AI, Intuit will be ready. Check out GenOS, our proprietary generative AI operating system; our AI Research Program; our responsible AI principles; and Intuit Assist, our financial assistant that uses the power of generative AI to provide intelligent and personalized recommendations.