How 2024 is Ending, But AI is Just Getting Started

I bet you’re in a relaxed mood these days. With Christmas just ending and New Year’s Eve around the corner, it’s hard not to.

It’s actually tomorrow. Most of us are either on a fully-fledged two-week vacation, or might have taken only a few days off.

In any case, today might be the last day of work for most of us.

But not for AI.

While we humans love to take a break, AI can work tirelessly as we sleep (or while we’re eating more than we can carry during the festive season).

2024 has proven that Generative AI has the potential of taking vast amounts of work off our plates (pun intended). In some industries it’s up to 80% (think content generation, sales, outreach), whereas others have been slower adopters (healthcare, law, finance, due to regulations & AI hallucinations)

It was a year of raw AI “horsepower” increases and countless ideas that funneled these capabilities into business cases. It’s like drilling for oil, hitting a deposit, and the oil shooting into the air. 

Engineers have created AI models that are far more powerful than what we could make use of in 2024.

The AI oil was shooting into the sky, but the general business landscape wasn’t able to build “pipes” and “pumps” to collect it effectively. 

Collective wisdom has it that if we stopped developing AI models today, we’d already have TEN YEARS worth of technology to make use of.

In other words, the engineering breakthroughs we have achieved so far are enough to fundamentally change how we work for the next ten years. But technology advancements don’t end with 2024.

It’s true that Generative AI is still rough around the edges, and that we can’t trust its outputs completely yet. But the raw horsepower is there.

The important thing to understand is that it improves human output, and doesn’t replace it.

But this alone is a great help already! How much faster can you read a social media post than write it? Maybe ten times faster? That’s what I mean – AI generates the post and you only adjust it.

The work that we AI consultants do is to build “rigs” around the “oil”. We channel the raw computing power of AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc.) into business processes.

We build applications that let you generate output at the click of a button. It’s “AI power” multiplied by “process automation”. That’s what 2024 was about. And this approach is only getting started. 

There’s a lot of noise out there: new model launches, product prototypes, new tools coming out every week. If you’re a business owner or operator, you can’t be blamed for losing sight of what’s important.

And social media doesn’t make it easy – it’s actually so bad that when I go to LinkedIn to write a post or a message, I find myself scrolling through the feed of shiny new announcements, and ten minutes later I forgot what I went there for.

If there’s one thing that you can take away from 2024 is that you must shut out the noise.

Just throw away 95% of the information. Social media is a FOMO machine.

If you want to thrive in 2025 and finally get your annoying manual processes sorted, you have to think backwards:

1. Determine what’s holding you back. Be laser-focused. 20% of your actions make up for 80% of your time.

2. Come up with a repeatable step-by-step list of what those processes are made out of

3. Then and ONLY THEN you go out and search for the AI tool that automates your list

4. If there’s no tool out there, stitch together your own via tools like Zapier, Make, ChatGPT etc. or just reply to this email – we’re happy to have a look at that annoying process (for free)

In any case, just go off social media and enjoy a roaring end of 2024. Happiness is abundant by design, scarce by luck.

If you want to take AI into your own hands in 2025, join the Make Work Obsolete community – try it 7 days for FREE!

And if you’re quick, you can still grab 20% off with code END2024 until tonight.

Happy new year! 🎉
Robert