Gartner recently published its “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2024.” After spending 2022 and 2023 in the cycle’s peak of inflated expectations, generative AI (GenAI) has entered the trough of disillusionment for 2024.
The Gartner AI update signals a welcome shift in the GenAI conversation. It’s time for organizations to take a closer look at their GenAI initiatives and aspirations, especially concerning GenAI impact on broader, enterprise-wide productivity; the experience and expectations of their user base; and GenAI technology itself.
Accept the gift of disillusionment
In the world of Gartner’s five-phase Hype Cycle, the trough of disillusionment (phase three) is a necessary step every technology innovation takes on the road to mainstream adoption (aka the plateau of productivity, phase five).
The trough of disillusionment is where the naive optimism fostered in phase two, the peak of inflated expectations, evolves into realism informed by experience. As Gartner puts it in its Hype Cycle explainer, in phase two “product usage increases, but there’s still more hype than proof that the innovation can deliver what you need. [In phase three], the original excitement wears off and early adopters report performance issues and low ROI.”
Despite its negative connotations, disillusionment in the context of the Hype Cycle is a positive process. It literally frees us from illusions. And the viral success of ChatGPT, Github Co-Pilot, and similar GenAI apps has created a lot of illusions in the enterprise.
Goldman Sachs estimated that GenAI could raise global GDP by 7%—which translates to nearly $7 trillion—over 10 years. McKinsey estimated GenAI’s contribution to the global economy could reach $4.4 trillion annually. At the task level, developers coded twice as fast and business users slashed their writing times by 40% when assisted by GenAI. And IDC predicted GenAI spending worldwide will hit $143 billion in 2027, up from $16 billion in 2023.
