New artificial intelligence technologies, such as ChatGPT, have already created quite the buzz and their impact on our lives could be “massively consequential,” according to Goldman Sachs Research’s Kash Rangan, head of U.S. software coverage, and Eric Sheridan, head of U.S. internet coverage.

Until recently, AI has been largely used to predict people’s behaviours – what people might want to shop for or what videos they might be interested in watching, Rangan tells Allison Nathan on an episode of Exchanges at Goldman Sachs. But “this new chapter of AI is potentially even more exciting,” he says. “It’s not just about prediction. But it’s about generating – hence the word that you know as generative AI. It can generate not only content, not only videos and images, but it can also generate code…There’s a lot of enormous implications for how we automate our lives even more going forward.”

At the same time, the way we search online will evolve, Sheridan adds. Generative AI will “become much more conversational. It’ll become much more rich. And it’ll become much more actionable.”

Given the tech companies’ substantial investment in these technologies, both Sheridan and Rangan believe that generative AI is here to stay. “I think every product you touch on the consumer side is going to have more AI in it in the next six to 12 months than it did in the last five years,” Sheridan says. One consequence, according to Sheridan, is that AI will speed up consumers’ adoption of new products.