Gen-AI, Gen-AI, Gen-AI. The transformative technology has captured the imagination of everyone in the tech industry. Industries are shifting before our eyes, and the roles and responsibilities of data practitioners everywhere are going to shift again. The question is not whether an impact will be made, but what will the impact be? 

In this episode, Cindi sits down with 3 industry leaders to discuss how AI will impact our work and our personal lives in 2024. Sandy Carter shares how a severe injury in Brazil impacted her outlook on data sharing, and data verification in a world where AI can convince millions that the Pope wears puffy jackets. Jai Das sees a gap in educating technical workers if AI is too widely adopted. Prab Pritchandi shares how the financial industries will modernize in a heavily regulated environment. 

Industry Predictions: 

• There will be an intersection of AI Privacy and blockchain technology that will be poised to reshape the entire landscape of proof of ownership. And therefore, also revolutionize data sharing practices. We will go and move into a decentralized proof of ownership because of the increasing use of Gen AI and the fear of deep fakes. (34:15) - Sandy Carter
• Generative AI is going to get rid of a lot of the grunt work that we have day to day. Including some of the groundwork in data prep, some of the groundwork that analysts have to do, or even understanding reports and dashboards. I think the fear about [AI] getting really smart and destroying the world is really far-fetched. All of the LLMs and all of these GPT 5 and all of these models, they're great [but] they're not really reasoning. They're not right. They're great at getting some information and putting it in a new form. They don't come up with anything original. So I'm not actually fearful of [AI] replacing humans. (14:30) - Jai Das
• 90 percent of the data available in the world has been created in the last one year.And every year the amount of data is actually increasing. I could say data is really a good digital twin of your business [but] that itself is not a value unless you're able to convert this data to insights and then convert the insights to actionable insights. (1:06:00)- Prab Pitchandi

Key Moments

• Jai observes 2023 AI startups are missing profitable business models  (10:55)
• Jai identifies a gap in education. Developers are trained through repetition. But what happens when repetition is replaced by AI (24:53)Sandy breaks her femur and surgery is delayed by 48 hours due to data (34:54)
• Sandy says, Taylor Swift is Web 3.0 (46:30)
• Prab compares banking data and analytics to cricket (51:27)
• Prab wonders if Formula 1 can be driverless (1:07:00)

Mentions: 

• Microsoft CoPilot
• Google Gemini
• Midjourney
• OpenAI
• Top 10 data and analytics trends 2024
• The Year GenAI Comes to Fruition: 10 Enterprise Tech Trends Set to Define 2024

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.