Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Gaurav Pathak, VP of product management AI and Metadata at Informatica
The past two years have marked an extraordinary transformation period across all industries, driven by the dramatic rise of generative AI (GenAI). While 2023 and 2024 earned their place in history as the years of GenAI adoption and experimentation, critical conversations also sparked around AI policy, ethics and how AI is transforming the workplace. With this, the big question of when companies would begin to see measurable results and impact bubbled to the surface.
As we prepare to enter 2025, we anticipate another pivotal year where we’ll begin to see how the developments from this past year turn into tangible outcomes. Here’s what we predict for AI in 2025:
AI customization + ROI
Companies across many industries embraced new AI tools over the past couple of years. In this surge of AI adoption and experimentation, many organizations have been left disappointed by the clear lack of ROI from their investments. Although these efforts to implement GenAI have been mostly experimental to this point, organizations are now ready for the next phase, which is seeing the impacts and actual results from those implementations.
The year 2025 will see the beginning of the next phase, with companies moving beyond generic AI tools to embrace AI agents that cater to their specific needs – like Salesforce’s Agentforce enabling customers to build their own custom AI agents. Organizations will finally begin seeing meaningful ROI as AI agents are integrated into business processes, ensuring greater productivity by completing end-to-end tasks. These will become so powerful that “create your own agents” will morph into a space of its own, providing a new market for AI providers.
Regulation and compliance will slow AI adoption
While AI offers endless opportunities for automation and productivity, there are also endless risks with the whirlwind adoption of AI technologies and breakneck advancements. From bias, discrimination and privacy concerns to security and compliance issues, the need to carefully manage AI’s risks has become unavoidable.
Many more states and countries will begin to implement policies to prevent risk, like California’s AI Accountability Act or the EU’s AI act that impacts over 300 million EU citizens and thousands of companies operating in the region. At an organizational level, we’ll see the emergence of AI Ethics boards, along with AI councils to govern AI adoption and usage policies companywide. The implementation of legislation that advocates for regulation will lead to a plateau in AI adoption across industries.
In this regulatory environment, a company’s legal and security teams will both play critical roles in conducting due diligence when rolling out policy and new products. While this cautious approach may slow down adoption, it will mitigate risk while providing guidelines and standards for the technology.
Transformation in the workplace and workforce
AI will dramatically change the workforce. People will soon need to be proficient in GenAI tools as businesses prioritize upskilling their workers in order to improve productivity. By the end of the year, we expect to see many job roles requiring experience and skill with GenAI tools. We’ll also see more and more companies roll out upskilling programs that offer free education and skills training opportunities with AI technologies.
At the same time, the half-life of information has become lower and lower – with knowledge and skills becoming quickly outdated every time technology advances. For workers to stay competitive, they’ll need to stay open to lifelong learning, regularly adding new and refreshed skills to keep pace with the accelerating changes in their field.
Almost nothing in AI is certain, and the industry seems to change overnight. However, we can be sure that regulation will begin to slow AI adoption, AI agents will pop up in our daily lives as companies demand ROI and we will continue to see dramatic changes to knowledge demands in the workplace.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaurav Pathak is a seasoned product leader with an extensive background in AI, metadata management, and enterprise software. He leads the data science and product management team. He is responsible for developing metadata, discovery, and artificial intelligence solutions, including Informatica’s AI engine CLAIRE. Before his current position, Gaurav held several roles at Informatica and Oracle, focusing on metadata products, data management, and business intelligence. Gaurav earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology.
