
Erik Schwartz
Chief AI Officer
Two years after the launch of ChatGPT 3.5, the staggering pace of AI innovation is reshaping industries and redefining the way we live and work. Here are my four key predictions for how AI will continue to evolve in 2025 and what it means for organizations and their leaders.
1. Agents: The Next Leap in Automation
AI agents are poised to fundamentally change how we delegate tasks and manage workflows. Unlike bots, which are reactive and depend on user prompts, agents are autonomous. They can reason, self-correct, and adapt to achieve a goal without ongoing human intervention.
For example, imagine you’re planning a vacation. Instead of managing the tedious logistics yourself, you give an AI agent your travel dates, budget, and preferences. Much like a real-life travel agent, the AI agent creates your itinerary and books the flights, cars, hotels, and dinner reservations. But the AI agent can also respond to changing conditions like delayed flights and inclement weather, including proactively recommending new activities and then booking them at your direction. By managing the stressful, complex logistics, the AI agent allows you to relax and enjoy your vacation.
Now extend this concept to the workplace. A business leader can define objectives, the AI team converts these goals into specific tasks, and AI agents execute these tasks. The agents monitor progress and make adjustments along the way. By automating the more mundane and repetitive activities, these agents reduce friction and free human specialists to utilize their skills, judgment, and expertise to focus on more complex strategic initiatives that leaders need to succeed.
Watch for businesses to begin integrating these tools into their operations to improve efficiency and decision-making.
2. Enterprise AI: Unlocking Organizational Intelligence
Organizations today are overwhelmed with sprawling data systems, from emails and documents to chat messages and project management tools, but Enterprise AI solutions can make information more accessible and convert data into actionable insights.
This is a vast improvement over traditional Enterprise Search. By applying Generative AI tools and live Internet connections to enterprise data, new systems can understand the needs and intentions behind searches and offer the appropriate context for responses. They also know exactly where to look for answers — email, Slack, Wiki pages, Intranet sites, and more — all subject to user permissions and data governance rules.
Consider a company that’s planning a major customer project. First, they’ll ask themselves, Have we tackled something like this before? Who in the organization has relevant expertise? What lessons can we apply? Enterprise AI systems can provide these answers quickly from across the organization, rather than being held back by siloed data structures.
This efficiency will trickle all the way down to individual employees. For example, new hires often spend weeks navigating a sea of HR information, from benefits to payroll. Enterprise AI can act as a personal assistant, delivering accurate answers while respecting sensitive data.
A key feature of Enterprise AI will be its ability to create secure environments for employees to experiment with and utilize AI while still protecting proprietary data. This includes respecting employee permissions as well as data governance rules. This will empower employees to safely explore and deploy AI in their daily work, driving productivity and innovation.
3. Model Specialization: Tailoring AI for Specific Needs
The era of one-size-fits-all AI is coming to an end. Already, ordinary users have begun to appreciate how LLMs differ in their abilities: Claude from Anthropic is a standout for writing and coding assistance, but because it lacks internet connectivity ChatGPT and Gemini are much better for research, and DeepSeek-R1 offers a sophisticated reasoning model.
Over time, users will learn which model to use for which need, much like how we instinctively know whether to use Word, Excel, or PowerPoint for a given project. By chaining them together, users can create agents that employ the best tool for each task in a workflow, like using Gemini for research, R1 for strategic planning, and Claude for writing.
New tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo can even create high-quality videos from text prompts. These tools promise to transform content creation everywhere, from advertising to entertainment.
Greater efficiency will bring smaller, more efficient AI models, some of which may be capable of running locally on laptops or even smartphones. Not only will these be portable and more private, but they offer the possibility of the ultimate one-on-one user personalization.
4. Jobs and the Future of Work: Challenges and Opportunities
Much as how robots have revolutionized many factory floors, AI is set to redefine the office workplace. Some roles, particularly those defined by repetitive, manual tasks, will fade away and be replaced by AI agents. Fortunately for those workers, there’s an upside: Employees can focus on more meaningful, thoughtful tasks that require the critical thinking skills that only humans can provide.
For example, a news organization recently implemented a major change in how it reported on public companies. Entry-level researchers had to spend time reviewing and reporting on personnel changes in major, publicly traded companies, information that was publicly available online. The company replaced them with AI tools that can review, summarize, and report this information, leaving the junior staffers free to focus on meaningful storytelling.
In the business world, this will have a big impact on administrative, accounting, and operational tasks. Think of something as mundane as trying to schedule meetings: Executives often must wait days or weeks to assemble the right teams to review important matters. New AI tools, however, can analyze calendars and book optimal times for teams, freeing up human assistants for their vital in-person work. By employing AI agents to accelerate the scheduling process, organizations can eliminate bottlenecks and move forward with strategic initiatives.
Rather than fear for their jobs, employees should view this shift as an opportunity to augment their skills. AI literacy will become essential, with a focus on using AI to enhance productivity and creativity. There will always be a need for keeping humans in the loop to review AI outputs and making decisions based on sound evidence. As the saying goes, Trust but verify.
The rise of AI coincides with evolving expectations around work. Hybrid and remote models have become the norm, offering flexibility but also raising challenges around collaboration and isolation. AI can address these issues by simplifying communication and automating time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to focus on high-impact work — and enjoying their personal lives.