Artificial Intelligence (AI) went from a likely future to an active current state with the November 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, compelling us to simultaneously explore the promise of its business applications while also entertaining some frightening existential questions.

While AI has rightfully become the hottest topic in business, an information gap is already emerging. Early adopters are undoubtedly up to speed, sure, but what about those of us who hear a lot about AI on the job and in our daily life but don’t really have a handle on where it’s going or how we fit in?

At Excelerate, we never claim to have all the answers, but we also don’t shy away from complex questions. We put in the work, do the research, and make informed conclusions based on our experience and expertise.

Our informed conclusion about the future of AI is threefold:

It will fundamentally reshape the way we work across all roles and industries.
As business professionals and citizens, we must educate ourselves and participate in shaping its future, lest it leave us behind.
However unnerving technology-driven change may be, humanity has historically risen to the occasion—we’ve been here before, and it all worked out.

With these conclusions in mind, we will assess AI’s current state and near-term future before speculating on potential long-term futures and their implications for us. If we don’t hide from the moment, we believe we will survive and even thrive in the future AI brings.

Five Realities of the Current Business Landscape

We are in the heyday of Generative AI, a technology that has moved beyond simple mimicry to a sophisticated understanding of nuanced interactions using human language. This is the technology powering Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

In this rapidly shifting moment of advancements and new applications, it’s sometimes difficult to get a grip on where we currently stand.

As we see it, there are five realities currently defining the AI business landscape.

The Buzz is Loud: The business world is full of quick-fix guides to maximizing Generative AI, whether for individuals in their daily roles (“Top Ten ChatGPT prompts for Marketers”) or businesses looking to deploy enterprise AI across a variety of use cases. While many of these may be helpful and even applicable, it can be hard to sift through them to find the few useful (and reliable) pieces given the volume is turned up so loud.
Businesses have found value in Enterprise AI Applications: Already, we’ve seen businesses leverage AI to accelerate operations, enhance customer experience, fortify cybersecurity, and turn troves of data into actionable insights. From predictive maintenance and risk management to personalization and chatbot support, businesses have found competitive advantages and will continue to push forward.
But many business leaders are only beginning their AI journey: Their primary concern is often security. With high-profile public LLMs and their many shortcomings dominating the news, leaders are left to assume all AI comes with a similar risk profile.
Enterprise AI is a spectrum where security, cost, and functionality intersect: As the infographic we recently produced in partnership with Hyacinth AI illustrates, there are five unique ways to deploy enterprise AI. The level of data vulnerability depends on the decision a business makes, and leaders must therefore balance potential payoffs with associated risks when choosing the right AI model.
AI’s future is truly unknowable: We will outline possible future states but anybody who tells you they know with certainty where AI is headed needs a healthy dose of humility.

Four Things We Know About the Near Future

The near-term future is much easier to forecast than what comes after; there are four things we can say with certainty:

AI is advancing from generative to agentic, enabling it to independently decide and execute assigned tasks. Whereas humans direct generative AI through its steps, agentic AI is a free agent, so to speak, creating its own pathways.
AI’s knowledge on specific topics outmatches any human’s but it cannot compete with our general intelligence—our knowledge of the world around us, our context, and our experience. Yet as agentic AI develops self-improving algorithms it will reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), at which point it will match this human capacity.
Continued advancement will lead AI to Super Intelligence, wherein it surpasses the sum of human knowledge. This is the singularity you hear futurists and preppers talk about.
After this, we don’t know what AI will do or how it will do it, but we can speculate.

What Will AI Be Once It Becomes Its Own Author and Editor?

Well, that depends on who you ask.

AI’s critics worry about its capacity to reproduce the worst of us at unimaginable scale after training itself with our bias-laden information. AI, critics believe, will catalyze social stratification along the digital divide, calcifying inequality with increasingly powerful technologies.

AI’s champions, on the other hand, envision a future in which we get more done while spending more time doing what we love. The concept of Hybrid Intelligence is key to this future—a coevolved state in which we grow with AI and direct it to solve our most persistent problems and carry our heaviest burdens.

Businesses would find the resources to complete their most ambitious projects—projects that stand to make the world a better place.

Coevolution Requires Action

But this isn’t a passive, “Our world…only better” scenario that happens organically; hybrid intelligence requires action. We must evolve by reskilling and building infrastructure to enable future generations to grow in tandem with technology as, even in this best-case scenario, the most prestigious white-collar work will still radically change.

For example, doctors would work closely with AI, which consumes troves of data and every medical journal ever published. It will certainly compete with doctors when it comes to diagnosing patients and recommending treatment, but it will still take a human to understand the true impact that diagnosis has on a patient, an understanding that supports authentic empathy and can only come from perceiving one’s own mortality.

Encouragingly, history shows that this coevolution has proven out, with humans and technologies positively growing together to benefit most people.

Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future Jobs Report is already forecasting this, predicting that, over the next ten years, 92 million jobs will be entirely displaced, but at the same time 170 million will be created and over a billion jobs will remain in an evolving state.

Our Bet on Humanity

With every new technology, people have risen to the occasion to ensure the bad does not outweigh the good.

The Agrarian Revolution fed humanity in its cradle of civilization, but it also birthed serfdom. Yet people pushed back, giving us the Magna Carta and the first conceptions of human rights.

The Industrial Revolution introduced leisure at mass scale and its technologies expanded food production to meet Earth’s burgeoning population, but it also ground people down to a pulp, giving us child labor, dangerous factories, and poisoned waterways. But again, humanity persisted, creating labor unions, social justice protests, and environmental activism—we can disagree about how adequately the Industrial Revolution served us, or even how effective any of these countermeasures truly were, but people undeniably pushed back against industries’ greatest intrusions.

Now, with the information era still in its relative infancy but already giving way to Artificial Intelligence, how will we preserve our livelihoods and our humanity?

We don’t know, but we believe in our capacity to meet the moment. There will be some bumps along the way, sure, but humanity has long used bumps in its path to propel itself forward.

But if we want this best-case scenario, we must deliver it deliberately and thoughtfully—now is not the time to bury our heads in the sand.

What The Moment Demands of Us All

To paraphrase something we heard at Excelerate’s recent AI Roundtable, “It’s not about being let go, it’s about being left behind.”

Leaders who don’t invest in reskilling their workforce to already-shifting demands will, quite simply, fall behind those who do. Professionals who aren’t actively educating themselves about changes coming to their role will similarly fall behind those who have.

Don’t assume other people are dealing with this on your behalf. In every department you should have curiosity around how you can leverage AI and shape it to your needs. Whatever your job title, whether it’s considered ripe for automation or not, your professional future will be shaped by decisions people are making today about AI, and these decisions will be made with or without you.

That’s why this moment further requires us to think beyond our jobs and even our own lives because we must have our say, whatever it may be. We are in a unique position to shape the future of humanity—just by being in this moment, we have more influence than any previous or subsequent generation. Let’s not squander the opportunity.

Growing With AI: Why Co-Evolution is Key to Thriving in the Intelligence Age