GenAI: A timeline of the biggest moves in 2023

This year talk of AI focused on announcements over profits as the hyperscalers bet big on GenAI, appealing to the channel to bring the tech to market

One of the big themes running through the year, at least as far as vendors are concerned, has been AI. While the channel is still largely biding its time and considering the applications of the technology, the vendor side has gone full speed ahead on the technology.

The origin of the current push dates back to November 30, 2022, when Sillicon Valley start-up, OpenAI, launched its now infamous chatbot ChatGPT, which was capable of generating text with near-human levels of accuracy and variety.

OpenAI would continue to go from strength to strength since then, but it wasn't until January of 2023 that the large language models and generative AI technology powering ChatGPT would start to make waves in the channel.

January

In late January, Microsoft held its Q4 earnings call, during which CEO Satya Nadella, directed analysts away from the tech firm's "temporary" earnings slowdown and towards its significant investments in AI.

"The next major wave of computing is being born as we turn the world's most advanced AI models into a new computing platform," Nadella said on the call.

"We‘re going to lead in the AI era knowing that maximum enterprise value gets created during platform shifts," he said.

Microsoft already has "the first at-scale AI product built for this era" in its GitHub Copilot offering, which has more than 1 million users to date, he said at the time.

Following its investment in OpenAI, Microsoft would go on to develop, promote and test its Copilot offering with a select number of partners for most of the year, finally releasing it in November.

"The age of AI is upon us and Microsoft is powering it," Nadella said back in January. "We are witnessing nonlinear improvements in capability of foundation models, which we are making available as platforms.

And as customers select their cloud providers and invest in new workloads, we are well-positioned to capture that opportunity as a leader in AI. We have the most powerful AI supercomputing infrastructure in the cloud."

Later that month, Google followed closely behind, with its own round of AI references around its Q4 report.

The competing vendor tied its AI pivot to the announcement of roughly 12,000 layoffs, stating that the redundancies were in aid of pivoting the entire company towards artificial intelligence.

"Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry," said CEO Pichai in his blog post announcing the layoffs.

Pichai also teased that some big announcements could be coming soon.

"Thanks to those early [AI] investments, Google's products are better than ever. And we're getting ready to share some entirely new experiences for users, developers and businesses," said Pichai on January 20.

"We have a substantial opportunity in front of us with AI across our products and are prepared to approach it boldly and responsibly."

February

On February 6, Google announced Bard, a conversational generative AI chatbot.

Bard was first rolled out to a select group of 10,000 "trusted testers", before a wide release scheduled at the end of the month.

March

Momentum was building behind the vendors' generative AI development and the buzz had also hit the channel. By March, resellers and MSPs were already thinking about what the technology might mean for their clients. At the time, then-Softcat CEO Graeme Watt told CRN:

"I think we're still trying to get our head around what [generative AI] might mean for us specifically. Anything that's generating the need for data and compute is excellent for our business.

"It drives people to more on-premise capacity, it drives people to the cloud. All of that stuff needs to be secure, so it's got to be good for us."

April

As excitement built around consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT, IBM focused on enterprise-level applications, particularly call centre automation.

In its Q1 results, CEO Arvind Krishna stated the chipmaker was firmly in the AI race, but did not namedrop competitors Microsoft or Google.

By 2030, AI should add $16trn to the global economy, according to Krishna.

"We are seeing a lot more interest from businesses in using AI to boost productivity and reduce costs," he said.

"Productivity gains will come from enterprises turning their workflows into simpler automated processes with AI."

For enterprises, generative AI users will "worry about the data" used to train models and "cannot have an answer that occasionally inserts some fiction into the answer - they need an answer that is from reliable sources only."

IBM is in the race for enterprise AI, Krishna assured analysts on the call. In February, the vendor introduced Vela, an AI-optimised cloud-native supercomputer.

That same month, AWS bet on open-source artificial intelligence specialist Hugging Face to make generative AI more accessible and easier to deploy by forming a new collaboration agreement.

AWS and Hugging Face at the time unveiled an expanded partnership that will accelerate the training, fine-tuning and deployment of large language and vision models used to create generative AI applications.

May

As OpenAI continued on the campaign trail, founder and CEO Sam Altman warned that his company may leave Europe if it becomes impracticable to meet the European Union's regulatory requirements on AI.

Altman provided detailed insights into the company's stance during a Wednesday visit to London as part of a global tour centred on AI regulation.

Altman visited around 20 cities globally as part of his trip.

"The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating, but we have heard it's going to get pulled back," he told Reuters.

October

While vendor announcements around generative AI continued, the pace of adoption plateaued during the summer, giving channel and tech firms valuable time to adapt and experiment with use cases.

In October, the vendor announcements continued apace. At its Google Cloud Next '23 event, Google teased multiple generative AI initiatives, both around initiatives and pricing.

To strengthen partner participation and assist them in capitalising on the GenAI boom, Google Cloud plans to significantly boost funding by up to tenfold for both independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrator partners aiming to implement gen AI.

The company has also announced that it will double its rewards for services partners that drive greater workload adoption and accelerate the adoption of strategic products.

"Earlier in the year, we made some changes to the partner advantage programme around session specialisation because customers are asking for deep domain expertise. They want someone that can actually guide them through those areas," Bron Hastings, VP, ISV and channels at Google Cloud, told CRN at the event .

"So services have become a really core element and component of being able to serve the customer.

"That's both from technology and innovation. It includes migration services, cybersecurity, infrastructure modernisation, but it also includes workspace, and, in particular, as we bring in things like Duet AI to the customers, this is a big service element for that."

November

In November, Crayon UK general manager, Hayley Mooney, told CRN that the technology was set to underpin the MSP's strategy in 2024.

Mooney explained how Crayon UK takes an advisory approach to innovation for customers.

"We've worked across multiple environments. We could work with an HR department to drive employee engagement and build capability using ChatGPT and large language models into those environments to encourage collaboration.

"Copilot is another huge topic at the moment from a Microsoft technology perspective, and being able to leverage all of that AI technology to better collaborate across the businesses where we're seeing a lot of use cases at the moment."

The Crayon group was one of the few select partners to offer Microsoft 365 Copilot at the time, as the vendor was building up to a full-scale launch of the enterprise version of the software in November.

Meanwhile, Amazon itself was going full speed ahead on AI development, even pulling resources from other areas, like its Alexa division, to focus on the technology. This is how the hyperscaler explained laying off 12,000 people in its Alexa business.

CEO Andy Jassy, however, managed expectations about ROI in Amazon's Q3 results, by stating that the company was still in the "early stages" of AI development.

He emphasised the role of partners in the company's AI ambitions, stating that the partner network was why the company felt "very optimistic" about its AI prospects.

The month concluded with two weeks' worth of back and forth, after OpenAI very publicly ousted its CEO, Sam Altman. Afterwards, it seemed, briefly, that Altman would be hired at Microsoft, until it emerged that the board of OpenAI had been replaced in order to secure his CEO seat at the company.

The chain of events caused a roster of reactions among channel leaders, who pinpointed the "for profit or not" debate, a "breakdown in board governance" and Altman's personal changemaking potential as key sticking points in the debacle.

With so much development on the tech front, it will be interesting to watch whether that expected return or investment will begin to materialise in 2024.