The biggest AI news stories of 2024 range from Nvidia and Microsoft Copilot launches to GenAI cyberthreats and new agentic AI technology taking center stage.
From Nvidia solidifying its throne as the AI world leader to accelerated generative AI cyberthreats, the flood of artificial intelligence news coming from all corners of the IT industry in 2024 was massive.
AI and generative AI (GenAI) was the focal point of nearly the entire tech landscape in 2024 as it seemed every IT conference, product launch or anything news-related this year fell under the AI umbrella—from new AI agents to billions of investment dollars being poured into AI startups.
Longtime server and networking market leaders like Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise shifted their strategy this year to become AI-first, while cloud leaders like Microsoft and AWS poured countless funding resources into various AI fronts including cloud infrastructure, chips and GenAI applications.
(Related: AWS GenAI And AI Innovation Driving Sales Spike For Partners)
Worldwide spending on IT is expected to hit a record $5.74 trillion next year, up 9 percent compared with 2024, according to research firm Gartner. Both AI and GenAI are key spending drivers in the IT world.
Gartner said approximately 70 percent of enterprises are using ChatGPT for software development activities, while 65 percent are hiring MSPs to drive many of their GenAI initiatives. The research firm is predicting that at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028.
CRN’s list of the top 10 biggest AI news stories of 2024 including company-specific news from Nvidia, Cisco and HPE, as well as important AI market trends like AI security and solution provider investments.
Here are the 10 AI news stories of this year that you need to know about.
No. 10: Microsoft Partners Start Selling Copilot
Solution providers officially began selling Microsoft’s main AI assistant Copilot for Microsoft 365 in January.
Copilot has become a fixture of customer conversations for Microsoft partners, with Microsoft’s investment in AI expanding to buying power from the notorious Three Mile Island and even introducing an AI-powered assistant in Partner Center.
On Microsoft’s most recent quarterly earnings, Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella revealed that nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 500 uses Microsoft 365 Copilot and that its AI business should surpass an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion, making it “the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone.”
“Copilot is the UI for AI,” Nadella said. “And with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, agents and now autonomous agents, we have built an end-to-end system for AI business transformation.”
No. 9: HPE Private Cloud AI With Nvidia
HPE went all in with Nvidia this year by launching the new HPE Private Cloud AI with the goal of driving customers from AI proofs of concept to production with a turnkey private cloud.
Co-developed with Nvidia, HPE’s Private Cloud AI accelerates infrastructure configuration and provides the speed and scale of public cloud—while keeping data private and secure—with an end-to-end life-cycle software platform.
With a pretested and AI-optimized private cloud, customers can experiment and scale AI projects with a large ecosystem of AI models and development tools, while maintaining control over costs and financial risks.
“Nvidia and HPE didn’t just want to bring Nvidia and HPE technologies together into a solution, but we wanted to deliver an experience that would truly accelerate time to value for an enterprise adopting generative AI,” said HPE’s Fidelma Russo, executive vice president of Hybrid Cloud and CTO. “And this is why we have engineered the industry’s first turnkey private cloud for AI.”
HPE partners are betting big on the turnkey offering, such as Deloitte, which plans to create new generative AI agent applications based on HPE Private Cloud AI.
For its most recent fiscal fourth quarter, HPE’s quarterly AI systems revenue grew 16 percent to $1.5 billion. The HPE AI systems backlog now stands at more than $3.5 billion with a sales pipeline that is a multiple of that.
No. 8: AI PCs Show Their Face, But 2025 Will Be The Year Of GA
It’s been the talk of the PC market all year—artificial intelligence directly integrated into a personal computer.
However, the two flagship feature sets for AI PCs—Microsoft Copilot+ and Apple Intelligence—are not widely available to all users quite yet. Apple Intelligence is set to become available in all Macs powered by Apple’s M-series processors, and Copilot+ features are only available in a growing subset of PCs with a neural processing unit (NPU) in the system-on-chip. AI PC features include writing tools and an enhanced Siri voice assistant.
Microsoft Copilot+ PCs are billed as “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built.” The PCs hit the market in June, bringing more AI processing to the device level. Microsoft started rolling out new features and previews for Windows 11 and Copilot+ AI PC users, including a way to interact with Copilot by voice, a preview of an AI capability that understands text and images on web pages and a PC experience in preview that gives quick action suggestions based on images and text on screen.
Research firm IDC is forecasting that AI PCs will constitute 60 percent of global PC shipments by 2027. Although AI PCs became a big buzzword in 2024, they have yet to pull in many users.
“Now, the AI PC race has begun,” said IDC’s Linn Huang, research vice president of Devices and Displays, in a recent report. “The next few years should see rapid evolution of silicon technology and consequently of use case and user experience.”
No. 7: Threat Actors Using AI For More Personalized Attacks Than Ever Before
Another top security trend in 2024 is how bad actors can utilize GenAI for improving the personalization of targeted attacks.
“The same way we use AI for efficiency, threat actors use AI for efficiency,” MacKenzie Brown, vice president of security at managed detection and response provider Blackpoint Cyber, told CRN this year.
Attackers are able to cut down a significant part of what they need to gather through individual research across the internet, she said.
“They’re going to be able to do it in a much more effective manner,” said Brown. “Now they can tailor attacks based on the actual organization, the industry in and of itself. They’re using everything that they can gather so that they can decrease that amount of research and reconnaissance, so initial access goes faster. They know what external systems to hit. They know what targets to hit. They know exactly what is going to allow them to socially engineer their way in or actually be able to get a foothold and create some scripting and automation so they can spread across faster through the environment once they’ve been in there.”
No. 6: Cisco Goes All In With AI
Cisco made AI one of its top priorities in 2024, investing big on all fronts—from AI collaboration to AI security.
Cisco acquired Splunk for $28 billion in a move to create a complete Security Operations Center purpose-built for the AI era. This year also Cisco acquired privately held AI security solutions company Robust Intelligence to leverage Robust’s protection platform for AI models throughout their life cycle, from development to production.
On the partnering front, Cisco launched a new line of AI infrastructure with Nvidia, the Nexus HyperFabric AI Cluster. The networking giant also launched a slew of new AI-powered Webex collaboration offerings and capabilities this year.
Looking ahead, Cisco announced this year a $1 billion AI investment fund to boost the startup ecosystem and expand the development of AI solutions with initial investments in AI superstars like Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI.
Cisco said it is on track to generate $1 billion in AI orders in its fiscal year 2025. “Our Q1 results highlight continued strong demand for Cisco technologies, driven by the need for modern, resilient networks as AI begins to scale,” said Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins in November. “With the breadth of our portfolio, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this AI technology demand.”
No. 5: Amazon Places Its Bets On Anthropic
Amazon and its $110 billion cloud computing company, AWS, made their decision clear this year that AI startup Anthropic is their choice when it comes to GenAI.
Amazon said in November it will invest an additional $4 billion into the AI startup, while Anthropic named AWS as its new primary AI training partner. The tech giant previously invested $4 billion in Anthropic throughout 2023 and in early 2024, making Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic $8 billion.
“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman in November. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”
With the new $4 billion investment, Anthropic plans to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Both companies said they will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium’s hardware and software capabilities. In addition, Anthropic and AWS have collaborated to give AWS customers early access to the ability to do fine-tuning with their own data on Anthropic models.
“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI and look forward to deepening our collaboration,” said AWS’ CEO.
No. 4: Solution Providers Invest Millions In AI Training, Certifications And Innovation Labs
In 2024, one of the biggest global channel trends was solution providers investing millions into making their employees AI experts via training, achieving vendor AI certifications and building AI labs to drive innovation.
For example, solution provider giant World Wide Technology invested $500 million in AI-related technology, infrastructure and personnel for its AI lab. WWT also revamped its 10,000-plus strong workforce into AI experts, hired top AI talent and created homegrown GenAI products.
Global services powerhouse Accenture said it will train 30,000 employees on Nvidia’s full stack of AI technologies and start a new business group dedicated to the AI computing giant. Accenture’s new Nvidia Business Group will focus on driving enterprise adoption of what it called “agentic AI systems” by taking advantage of key Nvidia software platforms that fuel consumption of GPU-accelerated data centers.
IT service giant Cognizant launched a new Advanced AI Lab this year to focus on core AI research and breakthrough innovation. “We’re looking at actually expanding the state of the art in AI itself, coming up with new algorithms and technologies that would be useful for our clients,” Babak Hodjat, CTO of Cognizant, told CRN this year.
No. 3: GenAI Accelerated Cybersecurity Attacks
There are a number of emerging threats leveraging AI technology that are intensifying in the pace and sophistication of attacks. Security experts say the largest threat they see from GenAI is not a new tactic or technique, but an acceleration of existing methods used by cybercriminals and nation-state hackers.
GenAI is now allowing threat actors “to do the same thing they’ve already been doing—but do it much faster,” Chester Wisniewski, global field CTO at cybersecurity giant Sophos, told CRN this year.
“What was previously a one-day window might now be a four-hour window. What was a four-hour window might be a 10-minute window,” Wisniewski said. Also, the amount of work an attacker needed to do to attack 100,000 victims in past might now be enough to attack 10 million victims in the same amount of time, he said.
For example, China-linked attackers operating so-called pig-butchering scams have been able to use new AI capabilities to expand their scope, according to Sophos X-Ops research.
Previously, “human beings had to text each victim and then figure out which people were responding and respond to them. It was a much slower, smaller-scale process,” Wisniewski said. “We (now) have evidence that ChatGPT is being used to automate the initial stages of those conversations,” he said.
No. 2: Nvidia Leads AI World; Sales Surpass Intel And AMD; Unveils Blackwell GPU
Nvidia was arguably the hottest AI company on the planet in 2024 with a war chest of money, key partnerships and market momentum unlike ever before.
In third-quarter 2024, Nvidia earned nearly 75 percent more revenue than Intel and AMD combined in their recently completed quarters—as Nvidia has seized on its dominance in the fast-growing AI computing market to tower over its closest chip rivals.
Nvidia has become a household name not by accident, but by making early investments and acquisitions around accelerated computing that allowed it to build out a comprehensive and integrated stack of chips, systems, software and services just in time for the generative AI revolution. The company has been making game-changing vendor partnerships with IT giants like Dell, HPE and AWS at a rapid pace this year, which further expanded its market reach.
On the innovation front, Nvidia unleashed its blockbuster next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture and systems that are now starting to ship with OEMs as part of its accelerated road map of launching new chips annually instead of every two years. Blackwell-architecture GPUs pack 208 billion transistors and are manufactured using a custom-built TSMC 4NP process. All Blackwell products feature two reticle-limited dies connected by a 10-TBps chip-to-chip interconnect in a unified single GPU.
If Nvidia meets its forecast for the fourth quarter of its current fiscal year, its annual revenue could reach $128 billion, more than double the previous year and 64 percent higher than the combined full-year forecasts for Intel and AMD.
No. 1: AI Agents Takes Center Stage
From Google Cloud to AWS, the largest AI players in the world are building AI agents, also known as agentic AI technology.
AI agents are designed to independently make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. The technology flourished in 2024 because of its ability to take action autonomously to help customers realize their vision for generative AI to increase productivity.
Gartner predicts that at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028. “Organizations have long wanted to promote high-performing teams, improve cross-functional collaboration and coordinate issues across team networks,” said Tom Coshow, senior director analyst at Gartner, in a recent report. “Agentic AI has the potential to perform as a highly competent teammate by providing insights from derivative events that are often not visible to human teammates.”
Top use cases in the market currently include automating customer experiences by using data analysis to make highly calculated decisions at each step, as well as empowering workers to develop and manage more complicated, technical projects through natural language.
Google Cloud, for example, launched a new AI Agent Partner Program in November aimed at driving GenAI sales and AI agent development.
“If you can train an AI agent on the customer’s data, it can actually have a more fine-tuned and better customer experience than if you or I were actually serving that customer,” said Ben Kessler, CEO of Chicago-based solution provider 66degrees. “Essentially, what (AI agents) do is it’s not taking the human decision out of this—it’s improving human decisions with the correct data.”
