My first two articles of the three-part series, where I predict what AI will bring in 2025 and beyond, focused on the human-AI relation and AI agents. The last one will focus on the theme of AI ethics and literacy.

Prediction 9 of 12: Chat is the new Search: For too long, we have been subjected to the tyranny of the ’10 blue links of Google’, many of which are often tailored for what the advertiser wants, rather than the answers you are looking for. GenAI-based chat search engines like Perplexity.ai and OpenAI’s SearchGPT promise to change that by scouring the web and relevant websites and providing you with answers you want in a conversational format, along with the sources. This is a completely new, uncluttered, and intuitive search experience, and has drawn even behemoths like Google and Microsoft to experiment with this new way to search. The trend is bigger than a search-bar to chat – search became the way to ‘organise’ the internet, and Google benefited hugely from that. Now, perhaps the way to organise the Web and all the information it contains will shift to AI, with its chats, agents, and a much more human-like intuitive interface. There are obstacles along the way as a probabilistic GenAI based search engine will never be as accurate as a deterministic database of a traditional search engine, but the trend is irreversible.

Prediction 10 of 12: AI+ Human the new Human?: This is the only prediction that comes with a question mark since it is less certain and further out. Historians like Yuval Noah Harari have written eloquently about how the next evolution of the human species could be a combination of human and AI, harking back to the cyborgs of yore. Home Deus, which will follow Home Sapiens, may have Godlike powers (Deus in Latin is God), with the help of new age technologies like AI, Biotech, and brain-computer interfaces. However impressive it sounds, it could be a dystopian future, with the threat of obsolescence and the loss of individuality. Not that this has deterred Elon Musk and others working on Brain-Machine interfaces like Neuralink

Prediction 11 of 12: Ethics is the New Imperative: With these rapid and fundamental advantages in AI, the ethics around the technology will become as or more important than the technology itself. The pitfalls of unbridled AI are well known – bias, loss of privacy, surveillance, deepfakes, copyright and plagiarism, impact on jobs and meaningful work, environmental degradation, and the looming threat of a malevolent super-intelligence itself. While the threats are many, the good news is that we have started to have ethics conversation much earlier in the game than with any other. Nuclear required its horrific Hiroshima moment for people to sit up, in AI they are sitting up and talking, framing guidelines and regulations, and convening AI Safety Institutes all over the world. This does not take away the threat, but it gives hope that us humans will control the technology, rather than the other way around, which is what happened with social media.

Prediction 12 of 12: AI is the New Literacy: I believe that the definition of literacy will change from reading, writing, and arithmetic to also using GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and others to become better at work and life. Companies are seeing a new trend, BYOAI or Bring Your Own AI, where 75% of employees are carrying along their own AI to work, because it helps them perform better (https://bit.ly/41GKJe4 ). Two-thirds of managers will not hire someone if they do not have the aptitude and curiosity to work with GenAI tools. Thus, managements across organisations, irrespective of sector or geography, need to frame the right policies and build enablers for all their employees to become AI Literate, a concept I call ‘JanAI.’