The increasing development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be denied. It just makes a lot of things easier. For instance, OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT allow for faster and more efficient creation of new content, like articles and images. It is for this reason that professionals and businesses worldwide are highly interested in integrating the use of AI in their daily work lives.
The growing interest in and use of AI are supported by the fact that, according to Google Trends, searches for AI website builders had a 50% increase over the past 12 months. The PwC 2022 AI Business Survey also projected that by 2023, AI will add more than $15 trillion to the global economy. This is backed by the statistic that 40% of company executives declared that they have experienced increased productivity since they began using AI platforms.
These figures certainly mean future growth for both AI development and adoption. But according to an expert, AI will not be the only emerging technology that will benefit from its popularity. Agata Slater, blockchain consultant for IBM for Central and Eastern Europe, expressed her professional opinion that AI’s popularity will have a parallel effect on blockchain adoption.
“Questions will start popping up about what is happening to our data, where it is going and what has fueled ChatGPT. All these questions about privacy, transparency and immutability will become relevant, so it might lead to greater blockchain adoption amidst this backdrop of AI,” Slater explained in an interview during the Technology of Tomorrow Conference 2023.
Although it is also considered an emerging technology, blockchain has the ability to act as the base layer or foundation of AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), the metaverse and WEB3. This is because blockchain offers a way for data to be recorded and stored in an immutable and timestamped manner. This not only enables security, traceability and transparency of data, but also allows for the protection of privacy.
“So rather than thinking about blockchain on its own as a separate piece of technology that can change the world or at least optimize it, I think it’s more exciting to think of blockchain as a backend layer,” Slater said.
However, not any kind will do, as only a scalable blockchain will be able to keep up with the perennially growing data needs of the world. Simply put, a scalable blockchain is able to increase the capacity of its data blocks and throughput, as measured in transactions per second (TPS), according to market demands.
Transaction fees are also reduced further as the blockchain scales. This not only enables efficiency in ensuring that the network can handle the massive number of global transactions, but also unlocks practicality. No matter how efficient a technology is, if it is too expensive to use, then it will become a huge hindrance to its adoption.
When a scalable blockchain proves to be highly efficient and economical, it will be able to be more than effective in its role as a backend layer. And this will certainly not go unnoticed by developers of other emerging technologies.
This is especially true for AI, as it generates a lot of data and needs an extremely high number of transactions to be able run smoothly. And this is why there is a high probability that the growth of AI will spur blockchain adoption.
