The year 2024 marked a turning point in how technological innovations are regulated, marketed, and deployed on the web. Two European and French legislative texts came into effect, generative artificial intelligence continued to spread in consumer tools, and web design absorbed new technical constraints. This overview presents the facts, the gray areas, and the known limits of these developments.
AI Act and LSREN Law: the regulatory framework redefining innovation in 2024
The high-tech trends of 2024 are not limited to product launches. They are now shaped by specific legal constraints. The final text of the AI Act was adopted on March 13, 2024 by the European Parliament. It imposes transparency obligations on providers of so-called “general-purpose” AI models regarding training data and systemic risk management.
In France, law n°2024-449 of May 21, 2024, known as the LSREN law, creates a specific offense for deepfakes. Distributing algorithmically generated visual or audio content representing a person without their consent becomes punishable by law, unless the artificial nature of the content is clearly stated. Sexual deepfakes fall under a new article 226-8-1 of the Penal Code, with penalties of up to three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros.
These two texts change the game for web developers and online service providers. Any integration of generative AI into a site or application must now anticipate these obligations, which Geekfinity’s technovator blog closely follows in its analyses of web innovations.
Generative artificial intelligence: where web usage really stands
The spread of language models and image generators in web tools was massive in 2024. Writing assistants, customer service chatbots, automatic visual generation: artificial intelligence technologies have integrated into various application layers.
Field feedback varies on this point. On the productivity side, gains are real for generating drafts, translation, or data sorting. On the quality side, limits persist. The factual hallucinations of language models remain a documented problem, and no consumer model guarantees the accuracy of its outputs.
For web innovations, the dominant trend is no longer the raw integration of AI, but its regulation. Site publishers are adding layers of human verification, explicit mentions of generated content, and moderation filters. The AI Act accelerates this evolution by making transparency mandatory for systems deployed in Europe.
Data security and AI models
The use of models hosted outside the European Union raises questions of digital sovereignty. Data entered by users in a chatbot integrated into a French site may transit through American servers. The available data does not allow for conclusions about the actual extent of this transfer, but the European Commission has published a plan aimed at reducing the continent’s technological dependence.
Web design trends in 2024: performance and accessibility over aesthetics
The new web technologies of 2024 are not limited to AI. Design and user experience have evolved under the pressure of two factors: Google’s Core Web Vitals, which penalize slow sites, and the increasing obligations of digital accessibility.
Three axes structure the technical choices of web teams this year:
- Reducing page weight: heavy JavaScript frameworks are increasingly being replaced by hybrid approaches (server-side rendering, progressive loading of components), improving loading times on mobile.
- Adoption of next-generation image formats (AVIF, WebP) to reduce bandwidth without sacrificing visual quality, a direct issue for SEO.
- Compliance with the General Accessibility Improvement Framework (RGAA), which affects a growing number of private sites beyond the public sector.
In contrast, purely aesthetic trends (glassmorphism, neo-brutalism) remain niche choices. Their massive adoption is not confirmed by the available usage data.
Connected gadgets and immersive reality: a market waiting for proof
The segment of connected gadgets (watches, health sensors, augmented reality glasses) continued to grow in sales volume in 2024. Announcements of mixed reality headsets and connected glasses have multiplied.
The factual observation is more nuanced than the announcements. Adoption rates for augmented reality on the web remain low outside of e-commerce (virtual try-ons, furniture visualization). Immersive technologies benefit from public funding, such as the France 2030 project calls, but their integration into mainstream web journeys remains experimental.
The domestic Internet of Things (IoT), on the other hand, is progressing more tangibly. Unified protocols like Matter facilitate interoperability between manufacturers. The security of these connected objects remains a blind spot: software updates are not guaranteed over time, and the attack surface increases with each device added to the network.
What these technological trends reveal about the maturity of the sector
The year 2024 stands out from previous years due to an increasing gap between technological offerings and organizations’ ability to absorb them. The tools exist, regulatory frameworks are becoming clearer, but internal skills to deploy these solutions are lacking in most structures.
The list of available web innovations is growing every quarter. The question is no longer which technologies to adopt, but which ones are realistic to maintain, secure, and ensure compliance over time. This is probably the most structuring fact of this year: regulatory constraints now weigh as heavily as technical constraints in innovation choices.