Artificial intelligence has been around for decades but you’d never guess that from the tsunami of attention it has been getting lately. One news organization called 2023 “the year we played with artificial intelligence — and weren’t sure what to do about it.”
If that’s the case, then 2024 was when it all came together. Businesses and people finally understood the concept of machine learning and all that it could accomplish in terms of automation and personalization. With the genie now out of the bottle, there’s no going back.
The AI market is going to advance even faster in 2025. Businesses can prepare for what is coming by getting ahead of these trends:
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Trend #1: Chatbots will become even smarter, morph into agents. We’ve all seen it coming: Chatbots are getting smarter. The next iteration? AI agents that remember personal preferences and act like true assistants. The brilliance of agents is their ability to automate multiple tasks, and few areas are more ripe for such disruption than Human Resources. Since the function is largely centered around knowledge sharing and exchanging information, agents can quickly assemble information from multiple sources to provide personalized and automated services such as event and campaign creation.
Recruiters sourcing for a particular role currently have to click through multiple systems to write an email, post on social media and gather analytics to go into a report. Generative AI is handling much of that. Agents, however, can do all of those tasks in a single prompt, allowing recruiters to get on with their day.
On sourcing emails alone, GenAI can save almost one hour per day by creating and sending high quality, personalized emails that average a 50% response rate. This is compared to a standard form-type email that returns an anemic 14% response rate. Email is just one of 10 to 20 everyday tasks that agents can perform for recruiters. Sourcing and screening candidates and creating personalized career paths for employees are other examples.
Of course, there are other applications for AI agents outside of HR. Companies are using them to build sales pipelines and trade cryptocurrencies. HR, however — and this cannot be stressed enough — is where agents are going to trigger a full-on Sputnik moment in organizations.
Trend #2: The five-year strategic plan is dead. GenAI is shrinking the window on business plans down to two years, and even that may still be too long. Technology is moving at such velocity that it is altering organizational planning, and companies are simply not prepared to deal with rapid scaling.
In fact, less than half feel highly prepared for the most basic requirements, such as data management, according to the latest Deloitte AI report. Only 37% of organizations surveyed would say they had a strategy that was prepared enough to deal with the broad adoption of GenAI tools. Even more worrisome: Just 20% said their employees were ready for AI.
The Deloitte findings underscore a separate Gartner study that found one-third of GenAI projects will wind up abandoned by 2025.
A farmer in the 1920s had the luxury of a decade or two to alter a business plan. Not so today for entrepreneurs. If organizations do not execute an operating plan within a 12- to 24-month period, they could miss out on growth opportunities. Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. AI is that clenched fist.
Trend #3: A GenAI crash is coming. Consolidation is going to happen among companies that create GenAI technologies. There are too many players building too many tools with very little business value. Many of them will fold, and those that are left standing will create the next iteration of tools. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The first version of the internet crashed after billions of dollars were pumped into it but there was no return on that investment.
It wasn’t until the second version of the web came along about a decade later did businesses start to make money, but the industry needed web 1.0 to crash in order for technologists to develop web 2.0, the engine of e-commerce. They found it, and the return on investment is tremendous now. A similar trend is unfolding with AI, and it is welcome.
GenAI came on the scene in 2023 after budgets for 2024 had already been established. Companies began making incremental investments this year, Bain found, with the ultimate goal of AI being self-funded from productivity and efficiency gains.
Companies would find ROI faster were it not for a resistance to adopting the technology. Fear has gripped organizations because of the legal and compliance risks, but the panic is not warranted. While there are risks, organizations can overcome them by using GenAI on a case-by-case basis instead of all at once. Individual use cases are how organizations can control these technologies and demonstrate value.
Measure and quantify
Measure and quantify? That’s the Achilles heel of most tech trends. The funny thing about predicting trends is that so few of them ever actually pan out because most aren’t measurable and quantifiable. Business goals need hard and fast data to be measured, yet trends are largely ephemeral.
The three trends I just outlined — AI agents, the narrowing of the strategic business outlook and market consolidation among tech enterprises — will help business leaders plan next year for what is to come, and determine if their AI tools are returning a profit or not.
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