Ehhh I'll give you my straight up honest opinion. If a business is claiming to be "next-gen" and what-not, I would just instantly mark it to be avoided by myself. It is extremely misleading and unrealistic IMO... Just a marketing trick to try and create a hype bandwagon into liking a new start-up when it probably isn't as good as it is made out to be IMO. Like try and appear "different" or "better" when in actual fact they are more or less the same or twice as bad as normal vendors, maybe even using same techniques which were possible since win2k/XP/Vista
From what I can tell, usually the best ones are the ones that ignore the "next-gen" branding and just continue to do their own thing with their good team of skilled engineers/researchers, etc
As for malware in general, maybe it will become "artificially intelligent" but honestly it depends on what "artificially intelligent" even means because people may understand it differently. Anything in the world can be abused for bad if it is being used for good so if Ai can be used for security then sure it can be used for malware but that doesn't mean it'll happen any-time soon or be used to its full potential any-time soon. Not to mention that we have never even seen real "Ai" yet IMO. Maybe in 5 - 20 years time