2025 AI Predictions - Part 1

In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025.

AI: THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS

Forget the naysayers — organizations will embrace AI to drive out inefficiencies in the coming year. 2025 is the year when most organizations will more fully explore AI, and those that do not will risk their technology and processes becoming obsolete within the next few years. 2025 needs to be when everyone sows the seeds for the future. Focus areas should include reviewing internal and external processes and tools (evaluating whether they are fit for purpose or need replacing), making sure that compliance and governance are in place, and looking at AI costs (if not used correctly, AI can be very expensive).
Anjli Arora
EVP, Product and Development, Perforce

The future won't be bright for organizations that fail to act on generative AI: Think back to the digital transformation wave of the early 2000s. Companies that embraced the internet, digitized their processes, and invested in e-commerce became the Amazons, Googles, and Apples of today. Those organizations that waited or followed the wrong adoption path either adapted too late or disappeared entirely. Similarly, organizations that fail to act now will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the GenAI-powered economy. GenAI is not just another trend. It's the next leap in business evolution, and the organizations that understand this and move decisively will be the ones shaping the future. 
Marinela Profi
Global GenAI/AI Strategy Lead, SAS

Organizations Will Become AI-First or Risk Extinction: In 2025, organizations will not only adopt AI; they will become AI-first or risk extinction. In a world marked by rapid change, companies that do not embrace this shift will find themselves outpaced by competitors who effectively leverage generative AI to create valuable customer experiences. The urgency for AI adoption will become undeniable. Intelligent integration will emerge as a new focus, enabling organizations to address technical debt and connect fragmented data ecosystems. By utilizing AI's capabilities, businesses will transition from reactive to proactive decision-making, allowing for real-time adjustments that enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency.
Steve Lucas
CEO, Boomi

We Will Witness The Great Rebuilding of Enterprise in 2025: Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, GenAI has been the undisputed star of the AI Era. Now, GenAI is about to become the backbone of enterprise technology. As businesses have determined where AI fits into their operations and how to maximize its value, they are moving out of an adoption phase and into a reconstruction phase. Enterprises are now rebuilding their business operations with generative AI at the core, which will kick off an era of radical transformation in productivity and operational efficiency in 2025.
J.J. Kardwell
CEO, Vultr

EARLY ADOPTER ADVANTAGE

The great AI divergence: At this time last year, our expectations for LLMs were high, but we are slowly sobering up and looking toward the real-world impact of this technology in the coming year and beyond. As we move into 2025, we'll start to see major differences between those who have adopted AI tools early and those who are still in "wait to see" mode. Early adopters will have demonstrated or begin to show measurable advantages like faster product development cycles, more efficient operations, enhanced decision-making capabilities and improved customer experiences. The holdouts, on the other hand, will face mounting challenges as they attempt to contend with AI-enhanced competitors. Those who lag behind will be forced to face a harsh reality: they're entering a Formula One race with a bicycle, and the cost of catching up will grow steeper by the day.
Nikola Mrkšić
CEO and Co-Founder, PolyAI

AUTOMATION = AI

Automation will be synonymous with AI: 2025 will be the year for AI initiatives, where AI-powered automation has reached a tipping point from being a nice-to-have to a requirement. Simply put: automation is needed to solve AI's complexity. Organizations can now confidently advance and scale their AI initiatives using automation, moving from spending time managing and maintaining AI applications and IT environments, to proactively detecting and resolving issues. Automating these tasks will be critical for competitive advantage. In 2025, you won't be able to have an AI conversation without talking about automation, and vice versa — you cannot have an automation discussion without talking about AI.
Bill Lobig
VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

AGENTIC AI

Agentic AI will be everywhere — and it's going to make our lives easier: Agentic AI will take on tasks that will significantly alleviate the burden on human time. It will be able to create AI team members who take on tasks and can perform actions, such as carrying out research, summarizing and aggregating their findings (and critiquing and improving those before presenting them to a human), creating reports and plans, composing and sending emails on a human colleague's behalf, and more: in a fraction of the time it would take a human. All of this means AI will start using software applications itself rather than just being behind the scenes.
Rod Cope
CTO and Lead of the AI Innovation Council, Perforce Software

There will be some initial stumbles, but ultimately we will see a rise of Agentic AI: As development efforts using Generative AI to build better "mouse traps" occur throughout the industry, we will see rapid evolution of the technology on our way to achieve Agentic AI — AI that can operate more autonomously without much human intervention. In 2025, we will see an increase in the number of autonomous agents that help in all areas of a business — development, operations, security, marketing, sales, customer success, etc. — and inevitably, these agents will eventually be consumable via marketplaces. New platform capabilities will rise to allow multiple of these autonomous agents to work, communicate or orchestrate with each other and with people.
Joe Kim
CEO, Sumo Logic

Agentic AI Takeover: Although Agentic AI is not ready today, I believe it will start to be proactively applied in 2025, especially as organizations are investing in it and testing the potential ROI. They see that the AI models are advancing fast enough to cater to their goals.
Mohamed (Mo) Cherif
Senior Director of Generative AI, Sitecore

Agentic AI Will Evolve Generative AI from Passive Tech to Proactive Intelligence: Looking ahead to 2025, we anticipate a surge in the deployment of autonomous AI solutions. Generative AI systems are evolving beyond passive technology into dynamic, agent-based assistants capable of executing complex tasks. These agents will have access to a wide range of tools and leverage generative AI to understand user goals and intent, and to create and execute plans for how to use tools at their disposal to reach these objectives. As businesses begin to "let AI out of its cage," these autonomous systems will take on more actionable roles, from streamlining operations to optimizing customer interactions.
Peter van der Putten
Director of AI Lab and Lead Scientist, Pega

AI AGENTS

AI agents — the next frontier: If 2024 was the year of LLMs, 2025 will be all about AI agents. We've seen the potential of LLMs like ChatGPT to revolutionize industries, but AI agents will take this a step further. These autonomous systems, powered by AI, will be able to perform tasks independently, learn from their environment, and adapt to changing circumstances. AI agents will further improve things like automating complex tasks, from managing supply chains to providing personalized healthcare; enhancing decision-making with vast amounts of data; and improving response quality when they are trained on specific domains.
Karthik Sj
GM of AI, LogicMonitor

The world of AI is evolving to the next generation of automation, AI Agents. As with everything AI can be used for good or bad purposes. AI Agents will evolve in 2025, to become a real-world production-ready capability where these intelligent systems will make decisions. There will be some situations where the AI agent will run with some human oversight and in other cases without. Their ability to react to unforeseen scenarios and make recommendations/decisions 24x7 365 will be a game changer.
Paul Davis
Field CISO, JFrog

The Age of Decision-Making Machines: Generative AI will move beyond content generation to become the decision-making engine behind countless business processes, in everything from HR to marketing. IDC predicts that by 2025, 30% of major brands will be generating at least 50% of their ad copy using GenAI, but the real power will be in AI-driven business decisions, not just content.
Ravi Ithal
CTO and Co-Founder, Normalyze

The evolution of AI agents in shaping the future of business: Over the next year, we will witness the evolution of enterprise AI agents as they become increasingly sophisticated in their reasoning and comprehension capabilities. Emerging use cases will transform the way businesses leverage these agents, and the nature of human interaction with them will evolve as they take on more complex tasks and decision-making roles. Watch for the rise of AI-powered "supervisors," that will have the ability to move past simply automating tasks to truly orchestrating the interaction of all AI agents throughout an entire organization. This will make it exponentially easier for humans to administrate teams of AI agents across their entire business. By the end of 2025, AI agents will cross the chasm from tools that require more hands-on supervision to fully autonomous systems. Expect to see AI agents independently automating complex, multi-step processes without a human in the loop. This will undoubtedly transform how executives view AI adoption, positioning it as a powerful engine for unprecedented growth and innovation.
Dorit Zilbershot
VP of AI and Innovation, ServiceNow

AI AGENTS: AI GOVERNANCE

One of the expected innovations for 2025 will be AI agents focused on ensuring the proper functioning of other AI, detecting AI-generated content (from essays at schools to deepfake videos), ensuring the accuracy of information, detecting ill-intentioned AI, and, in general, protecting users from wrongful uses of the technology.
Miguel Baltazar
VP of Developer Relations, OutSystems

RECALIBRATING AI BUDGETS

Now that the peak AI hype cycle is behind us, enterprises will approach GenAI more pragmatically. Organizations will recalibrate their budgets to balance GenAI investments with other critical IT and data initiatives, doing more with what they've learned about GenAI's potential and limitations.
Molham Aref
CEO, RelationalAI

AI INVESTMENT REALITY CHECK

Organizations face an AI investment reality check in the new year: 2025 will force organizations to confront the harsh reality of generative AI investments as C-suites request evidence of returns on massive AI spending. With NVIDIA's $3 trillion valuation raising eyebrows and companies pouring unprecedented resources into AI initiatives, organizations will hit an inflection point where experimental AI budgets meet business reality. The pendulum will swing from viewing AI as a transformative standalone solution to treating it as a practical feature enhancement for existing systems. This shift will be driven by mounting pressure to demonstrate concrete business outcomes, leading organizations to prioritize AI investments in tangible areas like cybersecurity, business resilience, and operational efficiency where the ROI is clear and measurable. Companies will move from asking "How much should we spend on AI?" to "How does AI meaningfully improve our existing operations, and how can we prove its worth?
Bill Lobig
VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

RISK VS. REWARD

Big Tech Bets on GenAI — Will the Risk Be Worth the Reward? Recent earnings reports from major players like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft revealed a spike in quarterly capital expenses — capital being invested in land, data centers, networking, and GPU. The payback from the capital is not clear, but the reports indicate that the payback time could take up to 15 years. This is a staggering amount of capital and an extraordinarily risky bet. What's more, this investment is not coming from the venture capital community; it's a Balance Sheet item for these companies, and the cash is coming from their reserves. Why is Big Tech making such risky investments? Simple: because they cannot afford not to. If they don't make the investment, they will be shut out of the race. We are witnessing a market transition: If you look at the last 30 to 40 years in the tech industry, we have never seen capital investments at this scale. GenAI is going to become the next platform and to play in that, companies must make these kinds of capital investments or risk becoming irrelevant.
Ratan Tipirneni
President and CEO, Tigera

Go to: 2025 AI Predictions - Part 2

Related Links

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2025 AI Predictions - Part 1

In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025.

AI: THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS

Forget the naysayers — organizations will embrace AI to drive out inefficiencies in the coming year. 2025 is the year when most organizations will more fully explore AI, and those that do not will risk their technology and processes becoming obsolete within the next few years. 2025 needs to be when everyone sows the seeds for the future. Focus areas should include reviewing internal and external processes and tools (evaluating whether they are fit for purpose or need replacing), making sure that compliance and governance are in place, and looking at AI costs (if not used correctly, AI can be very expensive).
Anjli Arora
EVP, Product and Development, Perforce

The future won't be bright for organizations that fail to act on generative AI: Think back to the digital transformation wave of the early 2000s. Companies that embraced the internet, digitized their processes, and invested in e-commerce became the Amazons, Googles, and Apples of today. Those organizations that waited or followed the wrong adoption path either adapted too late or disappeared entirely. Similarly, organizations that fail to act now will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the GenAI-powered economy. GenAI is not just another trend. It's the next leap in business evolution, and the organizations that understand this and move decisively will be the ones shaping the future. 
Marinela Profi
Global GenAI/AI Strategy Lead, SAS

Organizations Will Become AI-First or Risk Extinction: In 2025, organizations will not only adopt AI; they will become AI-first or risk extinction. In a world marked by rapid change, companies that do not embrace this shift will find themselves outpaced by competitors who effectively leverage generative AI to create valuable customer experiences. The urgency for AI adoption will become undeniable. Intelligent integration will emerge as a new focus, enabling organizations to address technical debt and connect fragmented data ecosystems. By utilizing AI's capabilities, businesses will transition from reactive to proactive decision-making, allowing for real-time adjustments that enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency.
Steve Lucas
CEO, Boomi

We Will Witness The Great Rebuilding of Enterprise in 2025: Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, GenAI has been the undisputed star of the AI Era. Now, GenAI is about to become the backbone of enterprise technology. As businesses have determined where AI fits into their operations and how to maximize its value, they are moving out of an adoption phase and into a reconstruction phase. Enterprises are now rebuilding their business operations with generative AI at the core, which will kick off an era of radical transformation in productivity and operational efficiency in 2025.
J.J. Kardwell
CEO, Vultr

EARLY ADOPTER ADVANTAGE

The great AI divergence: At this time last year, our expectations for LLMs were high, but we are slowly sobering up and looking toward the real-world impact of this technology in the coming year and beyond. As we move into 2025, we'll start to see major differences between those who have adopted AI tools early and those who are still in "wait to see" mode. Early adopters will have demonstrated or begin to show measurable advantages like faster product development cycles, more efficient operations, enhanced decision-making capabilities and improved customer experiences. The holdouts, on the other hand, will face mounting challenges as they attempt to contend with AI-enhanced competitors. Those who lag behind will be forced to face a harsh reality: they're entering a Formula One race with a bicycle, and the cost of catching up will grow steeper by the day.
Nikola Mrkšić
CEO and Co-Founder, PolyAI

AUTOMATION = AI

Automation will be synonymous with AI: 2025 will be the year for AI initiatives, where AI-powered automation has reached a tipping point from being a nice-to-have to a requirement. Simply put: automation is needed to solve AI's complexity. Organizations can now confidently advance and scale their AI initiatives using automation, moving from spending time managing and maintaining AI applications and IT environments, to proactively detecting and resolving issues. Automating these tasks will be critical for competitive advantage. In 2025, you won't be able to have an AI conversation without talking about automation, and vice versa — you cannot have an automation discussion without talking about AI.
Bill Lobig
VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

AGENTIC AI

Agentic AI will be everywhere — and it's going to make our lives easier: Agentic AI will take on tasks that will significantly alleviate the burden on human time. It will be able to create AI team members who take on tasks and can perform actions, such as carrying out research, summarizing and aggregating their findings (and critiquing and improving those before presenting them to a human), creating reports and plans, composing and sending emails on a human colleague's behalf, and more: in a fraction of the time it would take a human. All of this means AI will start using software applications itself rather than just being behind the scenes.
Rod Cope
CTO and Lead of the AI Innovation Council, Perforce Software

There will be some initial stumbles, but ultimately we will see a rise of Agentic AI: As development efforts using Generative AI to build better "mouse traps" occur throughout the industry, we will see rapid evolution of the technology on our way to achieve Agentic AI — AI that can operate more autonomously without much human intervention. In 2025, we will see an increase in the number of autonomous agents that help in all areas of a business — development, operations, security, marketing, sales, customer success, etc. — and inevitably, these agents will eventually be consumable via marketplaces. New platform capabilities will rise to allow multiple of these autonomous agents to work, communicate or orchestrate with each other and with people.
Joe Kim
CEO, Sumo Logic

Agentic AI Takeover: Although Agentic AI is not ready today, I believe it will start to be proactively applied in 2025, especially as organizations are investing in it and testing the potential ROI. They see that the AI models are advancing fast enough to cater to their goals.
Mohamed (Mo) Cherif
Senior Director of Generative AI, Sitecore

Agentic AI Will Evolve Generative AI from Passive Tech to Proactive Intelligence: Looking ahead to 2025, we anticipate a surge in the deployment of autonomous AI solutions. Generative AI systems are evolving beyond passive technology into dynamic, agent-based assistants capable of executing complex tasks. These agents will have access to a wide range of tools and leverage generative AI to understand user goals and intent, and to create and execute plans for how to use tools at their disposal to reach these objectives. As businesses begin to "let AI out of its cage," these autonomous systems will take on more actionable roles, from streamlining operations to optimizing customer interactions.
Peter van der Putten
Director of AI Lab and Lead Scientist, Pega

AI AGENTS

AI agents — the next frontier: If 2024 was the year of LLMs, 2025 will be all about AI agents. We've seen the potential of LLMs like ChatGPT to revolutionize industries, but AI agents will take this a step further. These autonomous systems, powered by AI, will be able to perform tasks independently, learn from their environment, and adapt to changing circumstances. AI agents will further improve things like automating complex tasks, from managing supply chains to providing personalized healthcare; enhancing decision-making with vast amounts of data; and improving response quality when they are trained on specific domains.
Karthik Sj
GM of AI, LogicMonitor

The world of AI is evolving to the next generation of automation, AI Agents. As with everything AI can be used for good or bad purposes. AI Agents will evolve in 2025, to become a real-world production-ready capability where these intelligent systems will make decisions. There will be some situations where the AI agent will run with some human oversight and in other cases without. Their ability to react to unforeseen scenarios and make recommendations/decisions 24x7 365 will be a game changer.
Paul Davis
Field CISO, JFrog

The Age of Decision-Making Machines: Generative AI will move beyond content generation to become the decision-making engine behind countless business processes, in everything from HR to marketing. IDC predicts that by 2025, 30% of major brands will be generating at least 50% of their ad copy using GenAI, but the real power will be in AI-driven business decisions, not just content.
Ravi Ithal
CTO and Co-Founder, Normalyze

The evolution of AI agents in shaping the future of business: Over the next year, we will witness the evolution of enterprise AI agents as they become increasingly sophisticated in their reasoning and comprehension capabilities. Emerging use cases will transform the way businesses leverage these agents, and the nature of human interaction with them will evolve as they take on more complex tasks and decision-making roles. Watch for the rise of AI-powered "supervisors," that will have the ability to move past simply automating tasks to truly orchestrating the interaction of all AI agents throughout an entire organization. This will make it exponentially easier for humans to administrate teams of AI agents across their entire business. By the end of 2025, AI agents will cross the chasm from tools that require more hands-on supervision to fully autonomous systems. Expect to see AI agents independently automating complex, multi-step processes without a human in the loop. This will undoubtedly transform how executives view AI adoption, positioning it as a powerful engine for unprecedented growth and innovation.
Dorit Zilbershot
VP of AI and Innovation, ServiceNow

AI AGENTS: AI GOVERNANCE

One of the expected innovations for 2025 will be AI agents focused on ensuring the proper functioning of other AI, detecting AI-generated content (from essays at schools to deepfake videos), ensuring the accuracy of information, detecting ill-intentioned AI, and, in general, protecting users from wrongful uses of the technology.
Miguel Baltazar
VP of Developer Relations, OutSystems

RECALIBRATING AI BUDGETS

Now that the peak AI hype cycle is behind us, enterprises will approach GenAI more pragmatically. Organizations will recalibrate their budgets to balance GenAI investments with other critical IT and data initiatives, doing more with what they've learned about GenAI's potential and limitations.
Molham Aref
CEO, RelationalAI

AI INVESTMENT REALITY CHECK

Organizations face an AI investment reality check in the new year: 2025 will force organizations to confront the harsh reality of generative AI investments as C-suites request evidence of returns on massive AI spending. With NVIDIA's $3 trillion valuation raising eyebrows and companies pouring unprecedented resources into AI initiatives, organizations will hit an inflection point where experimental AI budgets meet business reality. The pendulum will swing from viewing AI as a transformative standalone solution to treating it as a practical feature enhancement for existing systems. This shift will be driven by mounting pressure to demonstrate concrete business outcomes, leading organizations to prioritize AI investments in tangible areas like cybersecurity, business resilience, and operational efficiency where the ROI is clear and measurable. Companies will move from asking "How much should we spend on AI?" to "How does AI meaningfully improve our existing operations, and how can we prove its worth?
Bill Lobig
VP, Product Management, IBM Automation

RISK VS. REWARD

Big Tech Bets on GenAI — Will the Risk Be Worth the Reward? Recent earnings reports from major players like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft revealed a spike in quarterly capital expenses — capital being invested in land, data centers, networking, and GPU. The payback from the capital is not clear, but the reports indicate that the payback time could take up to 15 years. This is a staggering amount of capital and an extraordinarily risky bet. What's more, this investment is not coming from the venture capital community; it's a Balance Sheet item for these companies, and the cash is coming from their reserves. Why is Big Tech making such risky investments? Simple: because they cannot afford not to. If they don't make the investment, they will be shut out of the race. We are witnessing a market transition: If you look at the last 30 to 40 years in the tech industry, we have never seen capital investments at this scale. GenAI is going to become the next platform and to play in that, companies must make these kinds of capital investments or risk becoming irrelevant.
Ratan Tipirneni
President and CEO, Tigera

Go to: 2025 AI Predictions - Part 2

Related Links

Hot Topics