AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: Upcoming and recent Chapter events, this week’s handpicked stories/reports, AAIA Team Spotlight: Omar Nawaz, Global Executive Director

AI in business and the enterprise news:

Recent AI news stories that caught our (and Perplexity AI’s!) eye over the last week:

• “2024 Business Opportunity of AI: Generative AI Delivering New Business Value and Increasing ROI” (Microsoft, IDC, November, 2024)

  • Read the report here

  • “...Key findings:

    • The primary way in which organizations are monetizing AI today is through productivity use cases. In the next 24 months, a greater focus will be placed on functional and industry use cases.

    • For every $1 a company invests in GenAI, the ROI is 3.7x across industries and similar across regions.

    • The top challenge around the world is a lack of employees with the necessary skills and capabilities to utilize AI.

    • Within 24 months, most organizations plan to expand beyond pre-built AI solutions to advanced AI workloads that are customized or custom-built.”

• Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era (Google, December 11, 2024)

  • “Over the last year, we have been investing in developing more agentic models, meaning they can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”

  • “Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era: introducing Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.”

• State-of-the-art video and image generation with Veo 2 and Imagen 3 (Google, December 16, 2024)

  • “Today we're introducing a new video model, Veo 2, and the latest version of Imagen 3, both of which achieve state-of-the-art results. These models are now available in VideoFX, ImageFX and our newest Labs experiment, Whisk.”

• OpenAI just made ChatGPT search free for all users — and Google should be worried (Tom’s Guide, December 16, 2024)

  • “These updates position ChatGPT as a more robust tool for retrieving information from the web, directly challenging traditional search engines. The integration approach of conversational and interactive access to information aligns with user expectations for a comprehensive and seamless search experience.”

• ChatGPT Search Now Free For All. Here’s Why You Should Try It (Forbes, December 16, 2024)

  • “In my experience, however, ChatGPT returns excellent answers for most of my day-to-day queries. In addition, I will often request that it show sources for the information it returns, so that I can double check a source and ensure that I’m getting correct information. In my informal testing, ChatGPT beat Google Search. One of the reasons: Google Search is now plastered with paid placements, ads, sponsorships, and links to other Google services, making it a much less usable and less friendly tool than it used to be.”

• 54 NEW Artificial Intelligence Statistics (Dec 2024), (Exploding Topics, December 2, 2024)

  • “Top AI Statistics (Editor’s Picks)

    • The global AI market is valued at over $279 billion

    • AI industry value is projected to increase by over 6x over the next 6 years

    • The US AI market is forecast to reach $299.64 billion by 2026

    • The AI market is expanding at a CAGR of 37.3% between 2022 to 2030

    • By 2025, as many as 97 million people will work in the AI space

    • 83% of companies claim that AI is a top priority in their business plans

    • Netflix makes $1 billion annually from automated personalized recommendations

    • 48% of businesses use some form of AI to utilize big data effectively

    • 38% of medical providers use computers as part of their diagnosis”

• HPE execs reveal why they cancelled $700M AI server deal (Network World, December 9, 2024)

  • “The demonstrable, defensible ROI for genAI technologies has been shaky at best. Sequoia Capital reportedly estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on Nvidia chips last year, but only realized some $3 billion in revenue.””

  • “And when it comes to the purchasing of equipment by CIOs or data center managers, he said, suppliers are currently in the driver’s seat: “When demand outstrips supply, it’s the customer who bears the brunt of the impact. HPE is in a position to prioritize certain market segments and product bundles as it allocates its limited supply of AI infrastructure.””

AAIA Chapters updates:

We’ll be introducing an AAIA Team member to you each week. This week, we feature Omar Nawaz, AAIA Global Executive Director:

Bio:

For over 27 years, Omar has led transformative initiatives across businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. His passion lies in leveraging emerging technologies to drive business growth, with a proven track record of scaling two companies from $0 to $100 million.

Most recently, as Chief Product Officer at Chargebee, Omar orchestrated a remarkable transformation in just 3.5 years, driving the company's valuation from $125 million to $3.5 billion. Through product innovation, exceptional user experience, and customer success alignment, he achieved 10X revenue growth and 4X customer base expansion. He built and led a global product and engineering team of 350 members to deliver this unprecedented growth.

Passionate about emerging technologies like AI and blockchain, Omar is committed to advancing adoption across industries and transforming how we work and learn. As Global Executive Director of the Application AI Association, he focuses on bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technology and practical business applications, helping organizations harness AI’s transformative potential while ensuring responsible and ethical implementation.

Email Omar Nawaz at: [email protected]

Our list of AAIA Chapters continues to grow! If you live in a Chapter city/region and would like to get involved, email the Chapter President.