MANY OF MY CLIENTS are huge retailers or have retail products that sell globally and this is a sector that is changing at great speed but not always as people expect. 

AI will be vital to the future of retail. Take online sales, which have reached 22% of retail globally.

This figure leapt during COVID but will not leap forward as much again because there is a natural limit here – physical retail will always play an important role in every society. 

The UK is one of the world’s most advanced online economies: online sales shot up during the pandemic from 20% to 37%, then (as I predicted) dropped back again, to 32%, which is probably close to where it will be for the longer term – significantly less than 50%.

By 2030, 90% of all customer interactions with larger companies will be AI-driven, referring on to humans only as needed. But it will be easy to alienate customers with poorly designed AI, especially with long delays to speak to a real person when AI can’t help.

MARKETING IS ONE of the industries that will invest most in AI. 

The vast majority of marketing executives already use AI, and one in five spend 40% of their budget on campaigns driven by AI. As a result, AI already influences over 6 billion decisions every day.

Future spending on AI will grow by 26% a year from $24bn today. Most marketing directors think that AI will soon be better than they are. As it is, all online campaigns which use Google’s own Marketing Platform are driven by AI. 

Most people have no idea how AI is already controlling what ads they see, what messages they read. They have even less idea how much AI already knows about them.

Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on AI, author of 18 books

OUR LIVES ARE totally dependent on the integrity and completeness of online search engines such as Google. 

However, for a decade now, search engines have been stuck in a rut. 

Search algorithms may be smarter, but they are still too easily deceived by poor content, and all they do is direct people to web pages. But what if there is no web page that answers the question properly?

Can we create new web content on the fly, in real time?

That was one of the motivations for Google to invest $2bn in Anthropic, as a rival to OpenAI ChatGPT. However, if most people start reading AI summaries of online content, in answer to queries, then actual website visits will be reduced, and that really matters to those whose content has been raided by AI to generate those summaries.

As a result, next-generation AI search may end up destroying the quality of online content, causing it to degrade and go out of date, by removing financial rewards for website owners.

By 2023, 60% of professional musicians were using AI to make music in some way, for example composing (11%), mastering (final adjustments of albums; 31%), or generating artwork (38%).

Music can lift the human spirit, inspire, empower, soothe and heal.

AI will redefine the music industry, creating delight for listeners while triggering outrage in musicians and producers. 

In 2023, The Beatles released a new song after forty-five years, using AI to process an old demo tape by John Lennon which was spoilt by noise interference, just one small example of the musical deluge to come. 

That track was almost universally acclaimed as a wonderful addition to The Beatles’ repertoire.