2025 trend: AI developments
OpenAI version five is due out in the coming year. It promises to be 100 times more powerful than the last iteration. If you thought AI was going to change everything, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
A week is like a year when it comes to how quickly artificial intelligence technology is developing, says Nyssa Waters. “What you knew last week is not the same as what you know today.”
Waters is Co-founder and CEO of Being AI – Customer Solutions, a company that helps people navigate the world of artificial intelligence and use it effectively in their businesses.
She says that while AI itself is not new – the technology has been around for decades – how it’s being used is changing rapidly.
Industry experts say we are moving towards an agentic society – essentially, where AI will start acting on our behalf.
During a presentation on AI in marketing, Chief Digital Officer at Dentsu Australia Mark Byrne uses the evolution of ChatGPT to explain this shift. If you asked earlier versions of the AI tool, ‘What can I make with these ingredients?’ it would produce a list of (often dubious) recipes ideas. With version four, you could upload a photo of your fridge and get recommendations based on what was inside.
But Byrne says OpenAI’s version five, due out in 2025, is supposed to be 100 times more powerful. Uploading the photo of your fridge will generate a unique recipe video. And the AI might even go ahead and order any missing ingredients from the local supermarket.
Google no longer
Further to that, Waters told attendees at the NZ Marketing Association’s Brainy Breakfast in October 2024 that Google as we know it won’t be the same in 12 months’ time.
“We won’t be searching, we will have agent optimised data and information. We’ve all played with ChatGPT and Copilot. Every business will have agents working for them, searching and serving up information,” she says.
“The children coming up now, they actually ask ChatGPT. They don’t go to Google, they don’t even think of it as a place to go.”
Further down the line, it’s Waters’ belief there’ll be no need for computers. Instead, cloud-based agents will be on hand to help at all times.
“[The agent] is context aware, it’s aware that I’m at work, therefore it will act as my work persona, it’s aware that I’m at home, therefore it’ll be a mum.”
Powering up projects
One area where AI is improving efficiencies in marketing and advertising is through digital delivery platforms such as Blutui.
Blutui’s AI-assisted code generator, Components, helps users quickly create anything from forms to footers, based on prompts you give it.
It’s a large language model that interprets design concepts, says CEO Graeme Blake. What you get out can be heavily curated or as free form as you like, depending on the parameters you set.
They’ve found it increases the amount of control people have over their work, and reduces the amount of rework needed.
“Now what would take half a day to build a form and get it all connected up and wired up into this site literally takes a few seconds… and you just paste the code into your project and you’re away.
“What do you with that half a day? Well, you’re more productive and you can spend more time researching or thinking or powering through the project,” says Blake.
Byrne corroborates this increased efficiency with data from the Harvard Business School, which found that employees using AI completed 12.2% more tasks, while doing it 25.1% faster and produced 40% higher quality results than those not using it.
Questions to answer
For Danu Abeysuriya, Co-founder of digital agency Rush, there’s many questions that need to be answered to ensure AI is used safely and effectively.
“We believe that technology has created a lot of society’s problems and it has the potential to solve a lot of them as well,” says Abeysuriya.
“What actually matters is how you wield it. So basically the ethos is that you can use a hammer, which is technology, as a tool to create something or you can use it to destroy something.”
This year, Rush co-hosted the first event in Institute of Design’s global series Shapeshift, which is all about taking responsibility in the age of AI and culminates at a summit in Chicago next May.
Based in Auckland, the first event brought together diverse voices from across creative, technology and business to discuss the impacts of AI on culture and democracy, particularly relating to First Nations and Indigenous cultures. It provided an opportunity to workshop how the technology could be used to create something good rather than more harm, says Abesuriya.
Understanding is key
Because of how rapidly AI is developing and changing, it’s impossible to become an expert, says Waters, but it’s important to improve your AI literacy.
“The basis of that is a core literacy around artificial intelligence. New Zealand needs some form of policy guidelines in place to be able to allow small to medium-sized businesses to start using AI with frameworks.”
Byrne agrees, saying AI technology alone won’t transform a business, so understanding the risks and implications from data to biases, to misinformation and hallucinations is key.
Creating an AI governance council within your business that includes a diverse range of people builds trust, and helps you to figure out the solutions together, he adds.
Next is to identify and priorise use cases. “AI can add value in lots of places, but where is best?” questions Byrne.
Waters’ biggest piece of advice is to get rid of your own bias over what’s possible.
“Imagine the most outrageous way of solving a problem and you can probably make it happen. Everything can be done.”
This story was published in NZ Marketing magazine issue 81, December-January 2024/2025.
Read more stories from issue 81.
