They also built supercomputers designed to handle the growing influx of data needed for evermore complex AI applications. Emerging-tech startups kept feeding the innovation pipeline, though many were running on capital raised before mounting uncertainties in the second half of the year saw venture investors pulling back from funding deals. Years of R&D into generative AI capabilities came to fruition this year, highlighted by the release of ChatGPT, a free AI-powered chatbot with a humanlike ability to produce original, coherent text from a handful of prompts. ChatGPT, which made its public debut as a prototype in late November, and caught on quickly with millions of internet users, was developed by OpenAI--a Microsoft Corp. -backed research lab that roughly two months earlier unveiled its text-to-image generator Dall-E2. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team.

Tech analyst Gartner predicts that one in 10 interactions with call center agents will be with bots within three years, thanks to advances is conversational artificial intelligence (AI), as well as labor shortages and high people costs. That's potentially bad news for call center workers but could represent savings for enterprises of about $80 billion in labor costs by 2026, according to Gartner. Gartner estimates there are around 17 million contact center agents worldwide today and those human agents can make up 95% of contact center costs. The projected savings in labor costs by 2026 are much larger than Gartner's current forecast that enterprises will spend about $1.99 billion on conversational AI solutions in 2022. Nonetheless, it projects that automated interactions with contact center agents will rise from 1.6% of all interactions today to 10% in 2026.