AI hype will die down, Deloitte exec says, even as AI becomes more important

While artificial intelligence has dominated headlines for much of the year, Deloitte chief technology officer Bill Briggs expects some of the hype to die down — even as its usefulness increases.

In the not-too-distant future, AI is “going to be embedded in how we think about every business process, finance, and in our portfolio, how we invest in our customer service routine and the products we deliver,” Briggs told Quartz in the latest episode of AI Factor, a video series set at the Nasdaq MarketSite (NDAQ).

As the technology continues to advance and become more integrated in business processes — from product launches to managing the global supply chain — Briggs said we could be seeing less of it. And that’s not a bad thing.

“In a way, it’ll become more important and less of a headline,” he said. “Which I think is a great bit of progress, actually.”

Deloitte published its 16th annual Tech Trends report this month, outlining some of the biggest ongoing and emerging trends in technology, and what they mean for businesses. Briggs said the biggest overarching theme of this year’s report is the potential for AI to become even more transformative for businesses — even if it’s invisible in the same way electricity has become integral for all companies across industries.

“For this year’s Tech Trends report, we put the emphasis on: AI is everywhere and there’s a ‘dot, dot,’ to say it’s being embedded into other really important advances in developments that you also have to consider,” he said.

Briggs said companies have and will continue to “lead with need.” That is, choosing models, whether large or small language, that best suit specific business requirements.

Small language models, as the name implies, are capable of processing, understanding and generating language, but are smaller than their large language counterparts. Instead of having hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, SLMs have millions to a few billion.

Although LLMs are in the spotlight, with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Briggs said companies will eventually use both model types to carry out an array of tasks.

“They’re working [in] concert because you need both,” he said.

Beyond AI, quantum computing’s “more concrete moment in the sun” excites Briggs most about the emerging tech trends of 2025. The rising technology uses quantum mechanics to solve complex problems that traditional computing systems aren’t powerful enough to take on.

“We’ve been talking about quantum computing for a while and we’re really excited about the potential over time,” he said. Although it’s not going to replace cloud and traditional computing, Briggs said post-quantum cryptography — the use of cryptographic algorithms to secure against attacks from quantum computers — is on its way.

Watch the latest episode of Quartz AI Factor above.