The AI revolution is well underway. Throughout 2024, businesses across every sector explored how AI, and more specifically generative AI (GenAI), could drive greater growth and efficiency. The rapid pace of AI development presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses designing their AI strategies for the coming year. But being informed about the realities of what AI can do, and cutting through the hype, is key to seeing a return on investment.
According to GlobalData strategic intelligence’s 2025 Tech Predictions report, the AI market will reach $1trn by 2030, though not without obstacles including rising data center demand, increased hardware costs, and limited availability of graphic processing units.
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GenAI will be the fastest-growing segment within the AI market, according to the report, which notes that it could drive the next level of business process automation across many industries and cause creative destruction, dismantling old business models while creating new ones.
Helen Hawthorn, head of solutions engineering EMEA, Zoom
“Next year, AI agents will move beyond task automation and focus on identifying inefficiencies, optimising workflows, and ensuring that critical actions are prioritised in real-time. With AI’s ability to automate programming, problem-solving skills will become even more crucial in building strong technical teams, forcing engineers to creatively overcome challenges while also catching AI errors. To ensure teams can work collaboratively and adapt to AI-driven transformations, the leaders will increasingly prioritise training teams in soft skills that complement technical expertise.”
The future of innovation will combine conversational AI with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to develop intuitive, AI-driven user experiences. These interfaces will enhance workflows by focusing on personalised, action-centric interactions that dynamically adjust to user behaviours and preferences. As AI assistants get smarter, they will become our first stop in starting new endeavours or brainstorming ideas. These AI agents will evolve beyond simply automating tasks and will perform more complex work for us, offering personalised, emotionally intelligent guidance and strengthening our interactions with others.”
Ed Thomas, research director strategic intelligence, GlobalData
“Agentic AI will be a top priority for tech companies in 2025. The next frontier in AI is agentic AI, which employs intelligent autonomous AI agents to carry out complex, multi-step reasoning, adapt to environmental changes, understand context, and take action to pursue objectives. Agentic AI differs from GenAI and conversational chatbots in that agentic AI systems have memory and can reason and search for
information outside the LLM.
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By GlobalDataIntelligent AI agents are being developed for a wide range of consumer, enterprise, and industrial purposes. Agentic AI holds the promise of improving operational efficiency and enhancing customer experience. Early adopters include healthcare, banking, travel and tourism, scientific research, and energy and utilities.”
Grace Yee, senior director of ethical innovation, Adobe
“2025 will mark a pivotal shift as ethical innovation becomes a non-negotiable standard for companies developing generative AI models. Heightened public awareness and growing distrust will bring critical questions to the forefront: How are these generative AI models trained? Do they perpetuate harmful stereotypes or biases? Are they exacerbating or addressing societal inequalities? In response, demand for greater transparency and accountability will intensify, pushing organisations to embed ethical considerations into the very foundation of their AI development process.
Those embracing ethical innovation will establish themselves as trusted leaders in a market increasingly defined by responsible AI practices and regulatory scrutiny. Models built on a foundation of accountability and transparency will gain a competitive edge, fostering citizen trust. Conversely, those who sideline ethics risk producing biased, substandard models, hemorrhaging trust and losing customers to tools that prioritise genuine commitment to ethical AI.”
Benoit Dageville, president of products, Snowflake
“In 2025, the challenges hindering AI implementation – including concerns around trust, inaccuracies, synthetic data, and AI rights – will largely be addressed across various applications. For example, significant progress will be made in developing chatbots that reliably cite their sources, enhancing the dependability of user interactions with data. Synthetic data might be an issue if you’re talking about training future generations of models, but the current generation of models are actually quite good for a whole set of applications that we can build right now.
“There are also innovative solutions emerging that address the ongoing GPU shortage, particularly as developers and startups are drawn to the expanding significance of inference. One approach is to enable customers in regions with limited or no GPU access to utilise GPU capacity available in other locations or deployments. As these technical challenges are resolved, attention will progressively turn to using AI for applications that provide tangible value, ushering in a phase of meaningful and impactful progress across the field.”
Sam Liang, CEO, Otter.ai
“The three ‘A’s’ of AI: AI avatars, agents and assistants, will transform workplace productivity in 2025. By the end of the year, at least 20% of C-level executives will regularly use AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks while still maintaining a presence and making decisions through their digital counterparts.
Use of AI Agents to conduct tasks will also accelerate, with 25% of sales calls, recruiting interviews, and customer support calls conducted by voice agents, instead of humans, in 2025. And AI-powered meeting assistants will become standard in most enterprise settings over the coming year. This can save teams an average of four hours a week and increase productivity by automatically generating action items, summaries, and follow-up emails.”
Steven Webb, UK CTO, Capgemini
“In the coming year, a key part of the drive to better govern AI will be tackling unauthorised AI usage. Our research indicates half of the organisations that currently have Gen AI policies for employees are still reporting unauthorised usage in the workplace, and a significant proportion of enterprises don’t have any such guidance in place. Unregulated use of Gen AI poses various risks, including functional errors, security breaches, and legal issues such as hallucinated code, code leakage, and intellectual property concerns.
“As a result, we should see new data governance processes for AI systems. This includes introducing pre-defined protocols for data fed into the Gen AI models, rolling out policies on the source, usage, access, and processing of Gen AI data, as well as standardising generative AI use cases across multiple applications.”
Sabrina Farmer, CTO, GitLab
“In 2025, AI will revolutionise code testing, empowering developers to shift their focus from routine tasks to higher-value work. AI will automate most testing processes, accelerating testing cycles and enhancing accuracy and efficiency. Developers will be able to leverage AI-generated insights to identify and address potential issues early in the development process, reducing the risk of costly defects and delays. With AI handling the repetitive aspects of testing, developers will have more time to be strategic, identifying and prioritising work that delivers greater business value.”
Randall Degges, head of developer relations, Snyk
“For developers, AI agents are poised to streamline processes within GitHub apps and pull requests, executing tasks such as code formatting, style standardisation, vulnerability detection, patching, and more. This trend points towards a near future where AI-powered tools help development teams achieve consistency, efficiency, and security in their codebases, providing automated, scalable solutions for both productivity and security needs. While AI agents will not replace human developers anytime soon, we will see them enhancing human capabilities in 2025 by tackling repetitive tasks, ensuring consistency, and offering real-time feedback.”
Pri Nagashima Boyd, VP of data, analytics and AI, Pleo
“2025 will see AI-driven tools become standard for real-time spend insights, identifying inefficiencies and suggesting actionable steps to cut costs, eliminate redundancies, and optimising budgets. AI will also empower businesses to shift from reactive budgeting to proactive financial planning, including automated triggers for budget reviews or renegotiations based on market benchmarks. Due to this rising prevalence of AI, businesses will need to develop smarter data strategies. Storing and processing excessive data has both financial and environmental costs, which businesses will need to work around. In response, we’ll see businesses leveraging only the most relevant data to solve specific problems, reducing waste, and lowering server emissions.”
Chris Pulis, CTO, Globecast
“In 2025, the integration of AI and Generative AI in OTT platforms will continue to streamline the process of content archiving, indexing and retrieval. The automatic tagging and categorising of content not only makes content easier to manage and retrieve but in doing so, reduces operational costs. This cost-effectiveness will have an impact across the media supply chain by automating the allocation of computational resources based on anticipated or forecasted demand. This is particularly useful for live events and new content releases that typically see spikes in viewer numbers. Here, AI systems will allocate additional resources in advance to ensure a smooth streaming experience without the need for manual intervention.
Samantha Wessels, president EMEA, Box
“As businesses increasingly look to adopt AI, we are also expecting to see an increase in the risk of Shadow AI. With employees under more pressure to deliver more work than ever more quickly, there will be an increase in the use of unapproved third-party AI tools. Shadow AI will place more pressure on security teams, increasing the risk of security threats slipping through the cracks as teams become inundated with these threats. While AI does pose a cybersecurity risk, in the form of Shadow AI, we also expect to see AI being utilised in positive ways as a catalyst for increased defence against cyber attacks. In 2025, organisations must counter AI-driven threats by using AI to enhance cybersecurity defences.”
Simon McDougall, chief strategist privacy & AI, ZoomInfo
“2025 will mark significant divergence in AI regulation between the EU and the rest of the world. The EU AI Act, with its phased implementation, will prohibit certain high-risk AI systems and regulate general-purpose AI models within the next year, with broader measures to follow. The Act’s enforcement will rely on detailed Codes of Practice and the allocation of regulatory responsibilities across multiple bodies in each member state. This picture is complicated by other EU rules on data usage, including ongoing guidance from privacy regulators, and new regulation in areas such as behavioural advertising, product liability and data portability.
This risks being overwhelming for all but the largest companies. The UK will consult on its regime within weeks, likely with much more limited focus – regulating frontier AI and asking current regulators to use their existing powers elsewhere. In the US, the Trump administration will keep everyone on their toes, with any AI regulation primarily seen through the prism of US competitiveness and trade, but possibly catering to Elon Musk’s concerns around unchecked AI as a threat to humanity.”
Matt Riley, information security officer, Sharp Europe & UK
“Deepfake AI will become a key weapon for cyber criminals in 2025, thanks to tools becoming cheaper and more accessible. As a result, we are likely to see more breaches involving highly realistic voice, video, and image manipulations. SMEs may face a surge in targeted impersonation attacks, including fraudulent transactions and data breaches. To counter this, businesses must adopt advanced verification technologies like synthetic media detectors, biometric authentication, and blockchain-based watermarks, in addition to developing a culture of vigilance through ongoing employee training. Investing in these measures will be essential to maintaining trust and defending against AI-driven threats.”
Wil van der Aalst, chief scientist, Celonis
Process intelligence will be the enterprise strategy north star in 2025 (and beyond). It will become the essential navigator for integrating automation, AI, and digital twins, enabling businesses to orchestrate complex processes in real-time. As enterprise technology evolves, siloed systems and isolated automation efforts fail to deliver cohesive results. Generative AI will have its “glow up” moment in the enterprise. Companies are struggling to derive value from generic AI tools due to a lack of relevant business context. Generative AI will move beyond general consumer applications into specialised enterprise use cases, revolutionising decision-making and operational efficiency. Generative AI solutions, when integrated with a robust process intelligence framework, can address this gap and provide tailored insights.
Raj Koneru, founder, Kore.ai
“By 2025, we’ll see enterprises fully embracing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to make information finding faster, smarter, and more relevant. Forget traditional search — GenAI-powered tools will take over, pulling together precise answers from scattered data. Whether it’s an employee needing a specific HR policy or a sales leader identifying high-priority deals, RAG-enabled search will deliver and ensure immediate, actionable results. GenAI will also be a game-changer for decision-making. Leaders will lean on it to sift through complex reports, summarise key points, and uncover actionable insights. It’ll save countless hours of manual work and help teams make sharper, faster decisions.”
Leonard Wossnig, CTO, LabGenius
Building on the success of AlphaFold 3, new AI models will accurately predict protein co-folding dynamics and binding interactions. These advancements will enable the design of highly specific binder, reducing the need for extensive laboratory validation in the early discovery stages. Recent studies, such as from Nabla Bio, have demonstrated the potential of these models, paving the way for their widespread adoption in drug development and plenty of experimental examples to come in the next six months. These molecules still need to undergo complex optimisations prior to clinical trials, meaning that closed-loop systems that generate their own data will become even more critical. By the end of 2025, autonomous research agents will independently design, execute, and analyse complex experiments, significantly accelerating drug discovery.
Rafie Faruq, co-founder and CEO, Genie AI
“Companies that have prioritised product-led solutions will excel, now that agentic AI is becoming a key part of the legal workflow. Big law firms will give up trying to adopt AI, and focus on what they are good at – human, high touch services. Small law firms will either adopt AI quickly and take on bigger law firms, or fail to adopt and may struggle to survive. Companies will carry on in-housing more legal work as AI helps them to do more with less and reduce external fees.”
Jess Clemans, investor at noa
“2025 is going to be the year of energy and robotics. While these are already hot topics in 2024, we’ll see accelerating strain on energy grids as renewables proliferate and data centre development ramps up. This will put massive pressure on the grid to better manage power and analyse grid conditions with AI tools. Meanwhile, robotics hardware is becoming reliable and cheaper, and as foundation models for robotics advance, navigation will become robust in chaotic environments. Off the back of this, we expect the development cycle to shorten and the usefulness of specialised robotics solutions to grow. This will see massive growth in robotics use, and a need for more (and better) dev infrastructure and fleet management specialised in robotics.”
Dr. Jason Corso, co-Founder, Voxel51 and professor of robotics, electrical engineering, and computer science, University of Michigan
“As we move into 2025, the fusion of advanced visual AI with robotics will drive unprecedented capabilities in physical AI. Robots will increasingly attempt to tackle intricate, human-like tasks, while synthetic data will play a critical role in addressing the limitations of human-generated datasets, an especially challenging aspect of physical AI. High expectations for breakthrough results are driven by the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in physical AI, putting pressure on the field to deliver transformative results.”
Neil Thacker, CISO EMEA, Netskope
“In 2025, agentic AI will significantly impact businesses, requiring security and privacy professionals to rethink their businesses’ current protection systems. Safeguarding these systems involves securing data, reasoning engines, and outputs while implementing fully automated protections to enable true business autonomy. However, many organisations are not yet ready for this leap. To stay ahead, leaders must adopt robust frameworks, much like those used for GenAI, ensuring innovation and security go hand in hand as agentic AI reshapes operational landscapes.”
Luke Alvarez, founder, Hiro Capital
“My main prediction is the fusion of wearables with AI. We will see mass market usage of AI at scale in wearable devices – people asking verbal questions of their AI assistant and getting voice responses in real time, using devices like Meta Ray Bans, Apple’s Airpods, your Galaxy Watch etc. This is primitively available now in a few devices but it’s barely used today. By the end of 2025, it will be slick and ubiquitous. Ten years ago, it was weird to see people apparently talking to themselves as they walked along the street chatting via headset on their phones. In 2025, chatting to your AI as you navigate the world, using a device that understands you and can see what you’re looking at, asking for directions, deals, dating info about people around you, recipes for the grocery items you’re looking at etc. will become a normal and ubiquitous behaviour.
Qi Pan, head of computer vision engineering, Snap Inc
“In 2025, AI will continue to transform augmented reality experiences, allowing any creative person, whether they are a novice or more experienced, to bring their ideas to life more quickly with added layers of creativity and immersion. AR will help to showcase AI in a way that is more visual and impactful highlighting text, visuals and on-screen directions. The launch of Spectacles will also make AR more social allowing people to connect and engage with each other in the same space through AR.”
Khalfan Belhoul, CEO, Dubai Future Foundation
“I expect that soon a Fortune 500 company may be led by AI. We’ve already seen the emergence of AI in executive roles. Evolution will force us to rethink what it means to lead. We’ve seen AI accomplish incredible things – from diagnosing diseases to driving cars, predicting financial trends, and even creating art. Last year, the first AI humanoid CEO was appointed by a Polish company, to lead with data-driven precision and strategic insights. It is not a far stretch to consider that AI-driven, not humanoid executive leader will assume a role on a board.
Eric Bowman, CTO, King
“In 2025, AI will be a key collaborator for our game teams, enabling them to innovate faster and deliver richer, more personalised experiences for players while also keeping the human touch. In the gaming industry, AI will unlock new ways to tailor content to individual preferences, from level designs to smarter in-game interactions that are more immersive, creative and can respond to player decisions. AI has the potential to raise the game and companies will be looking to find unique opportunities that push the boundaries and help them to find differentiation.”
