With 2024 around the corner, Sunny Bedi, CIO and CDO at Snowflake, has developed his future of work predictions for next year.

Prediction: AI Will Be Your Best Work Buddy

One of the most exciting ideas for workplace productivity is the deployment of AI assistants that help employees become — and continue to be — efficient and effective. For example, onboarding new workers is a complex process of educating the worker about systems, processes, and culture, alongside ensuring that they quickly gain access to only the right systems and projects. Looking forward, we can expect AI assistants tuned to specific departments and roles to provide that orientation, tied to their individual persona and accompanying them throughout their tenure at the company. As an organization’s processes and needs become more mature, they can then train the agent to do the same thing on their behalf next time. And when they hire a new person into their organization, that person gets that full wealth of knowledge from the beginning. Taking it one step further, these AI assistants will start contributing to larger enterprise knowledge. By ingesting new documentation and thorough feedback from existing employees, scouring the internet for new ways to optimize processes, and more, these AI assistants will become every employee’s best work buddy. This will quickly become the workplace standard and table stakes for increased productivity.

Prediction: Developers Expect To Be 30% More Efficient Using Generative AI Assistants

I asked my developer team to estimate how much of the code they’re writing could be produced by a generative AI tool, and they consistently estimate 30%. While this has yet to be proven, that level of efficiency is a real game changer. Beyond that initial increase in productivity, there are also the benefits of reusability and sharing. The AI-generated piece of code that makes development 30% more efficient today could be reused to help transform the AI tool from an assistive technology to a semi-autonomous technology. By continually improving the AI tool, organizations could then get it to extend code generation and efficiency even further, and leverage it again on other projects — increasing the overall capabilities of future developments. In addition, I expect testing and quality assurance to eventually be assisted by an AI agent, leading to faster and higher-quality deployments. Developers will still be imperative for the creative thinking and problem solving necessary to drive innovation forward, but their day-to-day activities and where they spend their brain power will shift.