An Interview with Alastair Masson, Head of Telco EMEA at Quantexa

Alastair has over 25 years’ experience within fixed-line and wireless telecoms and media. He’s held positions within professional services (consulting and systems integration), product, and client-side businesses. Alastair has graciously agreed to answer our interview questions. Read more about Alastair here, and don't miss his participation in 'The real world: AI applications and challenges' on June 27th at 2:40 PM on the PureTech Stage.

What has, so far in 2024, been the biggest surprise to you in technology?

 The sustained and indeed accelerating rate of progress in the area of GenAI. The part that’s surprised me in particular is the speed with which GenAI has reached the fingertips of the masses to drive practical – and sometimes impractical – goals. Alongside that, the emergence of multi-modal GenAI that’s bringing interplay between text, audio, video and images is really exciting.

What do you expect will be announced in 2024, and by whom?

Probably the least surprising is likely to be GPT5 from OpenAI.  As part of that I think we’ll see the major tech players in GenAI, like Microsoft, Google and so on, announce the general availability of multi-modal capabilities. More broadly – and perhaps more of a hope than a prediction – some harmonisation of regulation around AI is something that will help to sustain the development and adoption AI in a safe and responsible manner.

Which five companies should we watch in 2024, and why? 

Okay, that’s a big question. I’ll reach for my crystal ball and you have your share dealing account login details to hand. I jest. My thoughts, in no particular order, and very much my personal opinions:

Not a company per-se, but a part of the AI ecosystem – I expect some king of new entrant will materialise to disrupt the current semiconductor market that’s dominated by NVIDIA and other such as Intel and ASML.

Microsoft – through their drive and ability to bring GenAI into the Enterprise at scale.

Apple – doing in the consumer space what Microsoft will in Enterprise 

Open-source models, such as from Meta (Llama) and Mistral – because data security and privacy isn’t going away and highly secure applications, such as defence, that demand an air-gapped deployment will require open-source models.

And of course, Quantexa – because effective AI, whatever its application, is vitally dependent on having the right context; we’re already working with numerous tier 1 global organisations on some very cool Generative AI solutions in the areas of third party risk management, Financial Crime and customer engagement.