Happy 2024, Everyone. I wish you all a prosperous and fun year ahead.
One of my favorite things to do at the start of each year is consuming “annual predictions” content from people I respect.
Here are a few of my favorites from 2024 so far:
Fred Wilson is optimistic about Artificial Intelligence, Web3, and Energy.
Tomasz Tunguz has thoughts on capital markets and productivity gains from AI.
Elad Gil discusses what’s next in social networks, crypto, AI, health, and more...
John Milinovich calls 2024 “the year of multimodel AI”
Marc Andreessen’s wild techno-optimist manifest
I also enjoy writing and sharing my own predictions each year, but I should call out a few caveats:
My predictions are better described as forecasts than true predictions. I mostly follow the data and “bet on the come” in terms of the near future.
Some of my forecasts aren’t even mine at all, I just agree with them and I think they are worthy of resurfacing to my audience.
Some of my forecasts are more data-informed while others are anecdotal based on my experience as a marketer and CEO.
Here are my forecasts for 2024:
Tech headlines will be filled with mid-to-late stage startup news
Growth stage startups who raised capital in 2021-2022 are going to face a period of reset in 2024 as they require additional financing. This will result in a wave of shutdowns, M&A activity, layoffs, and also investments that reprice good startups appropriately to the current market. I expect Private Equity to be involved in the repricing and M&A rounds as well.
All of this will feel bad, but it’ll breathe new life into tech and realign founders, investors, and employees so they can keep building a better future. To read more about this, check out Elad Gil’s deep dive on the topic from early 2023. His post was a legit prediction and today I think it’s a rather reliable forecast.
AI apps everywhere, but users won’t care about AI.
AI startups were all the buzz in 2023, but most of the outsized funding rounds and early revenue winners are at the infrastructure layer whether it be NVIDIA with chips or OpenAI, Anthropic, and MidJourney with foundational models. 2024 will bring about a proliferation of AI applications that support an unimaginable number of use cases both personal and professional.
As a marketer, I’m excited about AI applications that “just work”. As we saw in the mobile app era, people didn’t care about Uber being an app. They just want an Uber to arrive quickly and drive them safely. AI applications will make people’s lives better in ways that only AI can, but people won’t care about the AI backend.
The Efficiency vs Growth Pendulum will swing back toward growth
After a brutal swing from zero interest rate growth prioritization to what I consider an overcorrection to focusing on efficiency, the pendulum will swing back toward valuing growth at least somewhat more heavily than efficiency. Efficiency will still be critical - we’re not going back to ZIRP era - but growth will be appropriately prioritized again. We’re already seeing early signs of this with Big Tech hiring and POVs being released like Bessemer’s “Rule of X” which highlights their belief that executives should value growth at least 2-3x higher than free cash flow margin based on how the capital markets value each.
Multimodal and Multipartner Creativity
As John Milinovich’s post outlines above, we should expect many more available modes of input and output from AI models in 2024. This change in architecture will enable many more AI applications to be built, but I also think it will force change in the “people layer” that supports these workflows as well.
I believe that Creative Professionals (designers, copywriters, art directors, producers, etc…) will benefit from moving “up the stack” into more of switchboard type function that understands how to intelligently leverage multiple partners and many modes of input and output to generate the best work they can. The highest performing creative teams will adopt this early and they will benefit from massive cost and performance efficiency gains, especially in performance advertising. I’m excited to hone this workflow in for Bamboo clients.
I can’t wait for all that 2024 brings. If you come across other 2024 predictions content that you think I’d enjoy, please share it with me!