IN DEPTH ‘‘
Martin De Saulles is a Technology Analyst
www.linkedin.com/in/martin-de-saulles
https://martindesaulles.com
As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, most organisations will have access to the same tools so human creativity and ingenuity will become more highly valued.
The AI opportunity
Technology analyst and author of Facet’s The AI and Data Revolution: Understanding the New Data Landscape offers insight into the potential of AI in the knowledge and information professions, and points to the need for a human/technology/information triumvirate to ensure success.
WHETHER we like it or not, AI is going to transform many aspects of our professional lives. Despite its current flaws and limita- tions, the technology in its various forms is reshaping how we find, interpret, manage and deploy information. In March 2025, Gartner predicted that global spending by organisations and individuals on genera- tive AI (GenAI) technologies and services would reach $644bn, almost doubling 2024’s figure1
. While businesses are expected to abandon 30 per cent of AI projects during 20252
that leaves a majority carrying on with their deployments as they learn what works and what doesn’t.
As a point of clarification, I use the terms data and information interchangeably in this article to avoid some of the semantic subtleties inherent in the way AI ingests inputs and exhales outputs. However, the key point I want to make is that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans, technology and information.
Going back to the invention of the metal move- able-type printing press in the 15th century and up to the rise of mass mobile computing almost 20 years ago, new technologies have incrementally distanced humans from the creation, analysis and distribution of information. The digital revolution in the second half of the twentieth century accelerated this as information could be replicated perfectly and at scale with the internet enabling cheap and mass distribution of data. However, it is the current AI revolution that presents the largest leap in this
14 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
evolution. The black box we call GenAI can now create new information in text, audio, image and video formats that previously did not exist. Autono- mous agents (Agentic AI) have the potential to make decisions on our behalf behind the scenes, sourcing, interpreting and sharing information out of sight. This article considers some of the opportunities offered by AI for information professionals as the data fuelling this revolution becomes ever-more valuable. AI is data-driven so individuals experienced in sourc- ing, organising and retrieving information and who understand the value that data has to achieving an organisation’s objectives are in an excellent position to succeed in this rapidly developing landscape. For the reasons outlined above, it is inevitable that some jobs and roles will disappear but new ones will emerge. As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, most organisations will have access to the same tools so human creativity and ingenuity will become more highly valued.
The Commodification of Large Language Models (LLMs)
In January of this year, the Chinese startup, DeepSeek released its open-source reasoning model. This was claimed to offer similar performance to OpenAI’s o1 model, could run twice as quickly and was developed for one tenth the cost. The release was a wake-up call for Frontier model developers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and their investors as the barriers to entry for LLM development had been dramatically reduced. This, coupled with the release of high-performing open-source models from Meta and others points to
Rewired 2025
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