2024 was a massive year for AI. Pretty much everyone went from never using an AI tool to regularly depending on ChatGPT and others for answers to all sorts of questions.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

My prediction is that, by his time next year, AI will be baked into just about everything we use, and at the same time, it will no longer be a topic of discussion.

It’s not much different than the emergence of the internet — back in the late 90s, business media was obsessed with the rise of “dot-com” startups. Simply slapping a .com on the end of a company’s name could cause the stock price to surge upwards. There were also plenty of people shouting about the dangers of online business, as well as those who were convinced it was just another fad that would pass as quickly as it arrived.

Then something interesting happened. After enduring the dot-com crash, people started building interesting and useful things on top of the internet. Instead of just throwing up a website and declaring that their business was now “online,” creative people built things like Google, Craigslist, Facebook, and so many other services that could never have existed before the internet.

Today, we don’t really think about the internet as a technology. It’s just a thing that we have in our pockets wherever we go, and of course you can shop, travel, and communicate with anyone, anywhere, any time.

AI is similar, in that it’s still in its new & novel phase. Everyone wants to talk about LLMs and GPUs and all of the other nerdy parts of the technology, but a year from now the fact that Artificial Intelligence is behind all of the tools we use will just be a given.

So What?

What does it mean that AI will become an afterthought?

First, it’s going to birth a lot of new technology that we never could have imagined. In the same way that a person who had never seen an internet-connected smartphone couldn’t have conceived of Uber, the services that we’ll use every day will be both obvious to us, and completely different from what came before them.

It also means that the people who made themselves familiar with how AI works will have a huge advantage.

While the internet has become user friendly to a sometimes ridiculous level, the people who understand how websites are built, how search engines work, and how to integrate project management software into a business have a huge advantage today.

Our opportunity today is to get ahead of that shift. If we could go back to the early days of the internet, I think we would all do everything we could to learn and develop our skills to be prepared for what was coming.

We can position ourselves and our businesses right now by being as curious as possible. Try out new tools, experiment with new ideas, and generally get comfortable with the ways that AI works, because if you do, by this time next year you will be that person in the office who appears to have superhuman abilities in the same way that people with basic IT skills were able to excel through the 2000s and 2010s.

And if you think that you’re already too late, consider how many people today still need help converting a word document to a PDF.

Shameless plug: Over on eLearningU we are offering a 3-part workshop called AI: Your Business Superpower. If you want to level up your understanding of how to use AI in your own work, this is a great place to start.