8 AI Business Trends in 2024, According to Stanford Researchers

TechRepublic digs into the business implications of artificial intelligence trends highlighted in Stanford’s AI Index Report, with help from co-authors Robi Rahman and Anka Reuel.

AI makes workers more productive, but we are still lacking in regulations, according to new research. The 2024 AI Index Report, published by the Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence institute, has uncovered the top eight AI trends for businesses, including how the technology still does not best the human brain on every task.

TechRepublic digs into the business implications of these takeaways, with insight from report co-authors Robi Rahman and Anka Reuel.

1. Humans still outperform AI on many tasks

According to the research, AI is still not as good as humans at the complex tasks of advanced-level mathematical problem solving, visual commonsense reasoning and planning (Figure A). To draw this conclusion, models were compared to human benchmarks in many different business functions, including coding, agent-based behaviour, reasoning and reinforcement learning.

Performance of AI models in different tasks relative to humans. Image: AI Index Report 2024/Stanford University HAI

While AI did surpass human capabilities in image classification, visual reasoning and English understanding, the result shows there is potential for businesses to utilise AI for tasks where human staff would actually perform better. Many businesses are already concerned about the consequences of over-reliance on AI products.[…]