2023 was the year generative AI made a dramatic entrance, triggering marvel and fear, as demonstrated by the Hollywood writers and actors’ strike. Since Henry Ford introduced the production line in 1913, technology has radically positioned itself to change work. In Ford’s case, the production line replaced skilled labor with low-cost, unskilled labor. AI offers the reverse effect, but its impact on the workforce could be just as profound.

According to Elon Musk, AI could make jobs obsolete, a prediction given weight by a recent ResumeBuilder survey of 750 business leaders using AI, in which 37% of the respondents said AI replaced workers in 2023. Other studies are less troubling: According to the United Nations Department of Economic Affairs, AI will change work without triggering mass unemployment.

More consensuses can be found in the predicted economic boom brought by AI. According to a report by Bloomberg Intelligence Analysts (paywall), ChatGPT and Google’s Bard will grow the market for generative AI to an estimated $1.3 trillion in revenue by 2032.

For AI to realize these predicted impacts, the cloud and 5G must enable an increasingly connected world. Here are my predictions for 2024.

The convergence of 5G and IoT will benefit society more than AI.

I believe the convergence of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) will create more opportunities than AI in 2024. By 2025, 5G networks could cover one-third of the world’s population, enabling 1.2 billion connections. This will power IoT, and by 2024, it’s predicted that there will be approximately 17.08 billion connected devices driven by smart homes and cloud computing.

Edge computing will shape critical industries ranging from transport to healthcare. The IoT healthcare market is predicted to grow to $289 billion by 2028. Increased network speeds at the edge will bring higher-quality connectivity to this field, such as wearable devices to monitor patients and even ingestible sensors to monitor vital organs.

AI will also complement 5G and IoT in the industrial and automotive sectors. IoT will be increasingly used to create digital twins to inform manufacturing, while 5G will support the production of smart cars. Although AI is critical to autonomous vehicles, so is the 5G bandwidth capacity to underpin the machine-to-machine (M2M) communication needed for vehicles to interact with their environment. The connectivity and adaptability enabled by 5G and IoT will produce more goods and services in 2024 and create more interconnected societies.

Cloud partnerships will continue to dominate telecom headlines.

As edge investments accelerate across industries, telecoms will deepen cloud partnerships for a more significant market share in digital services. According to a report by Fortune Business Insights, the telecom cloud market size is projected to reach $97.07 billion in 2030. This will be driven by remote and hybrid working and the rising demand for better communications and network functionality.

These partnerships must consider data sovereignty, as addressed in the U.S.’s pending Federal Data Privacy and Protection Bill. They must also consider interoperability challenges for multicloud environments and the need for standardization in hybrid cloud infrastructures for better automation, services and compliance.

Cloud partnerships will help telecom companies respond to the competition from app developers and over-the-top (OTT) service providers if these requirements can be achieved. These competitors provide voice and data services through their apps, challenging established telecom players to stay relevant.

Expect telecom providers to respond with more cloud partnerships. Recently, telecoms company One New Zealand and Google Cloud launched a five-year partnership to accelerate digitization and cloud transformation, and we may see similar deals struck next year.

Physical infrastructure investments will rebound.

While cloud deployments make up nearly half of enterprise workloads and have received the bulk of IT leader investments over the past decade, in 2024, IT leaders will prioritize their physical infrastructure needs alongside comprehensive cybersecurity strategies. This will form part of an ongoing activity to improve aging IT infrastructures.

Worldwide end-user spending on security and risk management is projected to total $215 billion in 2024, an increase of 14.3% from 2023, according to Gartner, which estimates that “spending on data privacy and cloud security are projected to record the highest growth rates in 2024, with each segment increasing more than 24% year-over-year.”

Greater cybersecurity investment will also happen in the public sector next year. The U.K. government has proposed new rules to regulate the data center sector to improve cybersecurity and resilience. A new consultation document, protecting and enhancing the security and resilience of U.K. data infrastructure, is open until February 22, 2024, and is seeking inputs from cloud providers, managed service providers and others as a sign of the greater emphasis on security next year.

Recent high-profile security incidents, such as the data breach involving the U.S. House of Representatives in March, will also have a security investment impact, as seen in the emergence of secure access service edge (SASE), a cloud-native architecture that unifies a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) (often used for communicating over the internet) with a range of security functions, bringing them together into one service. This will cause leaders to reevaluate their purchasing strategies and ensure a greater balance between cloud and network deployments.

Advancements in cloud security to address AI-powered cyberattacks will continue to influence the implementation of physical and virtual infrastructures. An example is Google Cloud, which recently launched Duet AI in Security Operations, a generative AI tool that helps security teams respond to threats.

David Joosten, in the article “2024 Predictions: The Trends That Will Shape The Industry In The Coming Year,” provides insightful forecasts on the key trends expected to influence the tech industry in 2024.

For a detailed look at these upcoming trends, you can read David Joosten’s full article on Forbes.