Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Josh Blalock, Chief Video Evangelist at Jabra
The past year has seen widespread corporate AI adoption,
with organizations laying the groundwork to achieve material returns in 2025. Leadership
teams budgeting for AI costs are particularly invested in practical
applications, with the goal of enhancing productivity, unlocking workers’
creative skills, and alleviating common pain points.
However, as with any new innovation, AI’s integration into
mainstream life and work carries challenges and inherent risks. Firsthand
exposure and education will go a long way in helping companies to clear these
hurdles and embrace AI as a value-add.
Overcoming limited AI usage
Despite ubiquitous hype, recent data
from Jabra found that just 26% of office workers use AI on a daily basis.
Organizations are finding that their employees’ collective interest in utilizing
AI may not match expectations around the rollout of the technology, which means
increased pressure to show that the past year’s investments have been
worthwhile.
AI is here to stay, but its failure to live up to its costs
in employees’ eyes may be partially caused by the pace of adoption. The
avalanche of AI conversation has created confusion and ambiguity around its benefits,
risks, and realistic use cases.
In the new year, companies need to remember that enterprise
AI users are also customers, and the more that they promote it on the business
side, the more difficult it may be to accelerate enterprise adoption.
Regulatory and data privacy measures will also help to promote wider adoption
at the individual level, reducing the level of uncertainty around the nascent
tech.
Solving the AI-washing dilemma
The AI promotion problem also exists in an external sense,
with companies falsely espousing or exaggerating how they’re using it. This
leads the public to view “AI” as a buzzword and collectively underestimate its
potential. For example, certain “smart” features aren’t necessarily AI-powered
but may be advertised as such, diluting the wider conversation around the
technology.
Leaders will need to increase transparency in 2025 to help
yield a more constructive conversation around AI and improve public perception of
its foray into business processes and everyday life. If AI’s impact is to match
its hype, companies should be highly invested in injecting certainty into the
public discourse and fostering trust.
It is still early enough for AI to become a trusted part of
everyday workflows, but 2025 represents a key turning point in that sense. The
longer AI-washing continues, the more rigid widespread perception will become,
and organizations will need to prove its utility throughout the coming year in
order to turn the tide.
Demonstrating AI’s transformative potential
Despite lingering uncertainty, AI’s promise will continue to
dominate conversations around the state of the business and tech landscapes in
2025, and rightfully so. It has the capacity to not only assist workers in
fulfilling their daily responsibilities, but to do so in a measurable, easily
automated fashion that maintains human guardrails and saves human hours.
This process likely won’t be seamless; older generations
have proven more resistant to interacting with AI due to fears of how their
jobs will be impacted. Those concerns exist at some level across age groups and
job functions. As a result, in 2025 corporate leaders would be wise to be
communicative about AI’s potential, seek to educate their employees, and start
small in demonstrating its benefits in applications like note-taking and
transcription.
Reframing the conversation around AI will be the key to
encouraging wider adoption in years to come, and it’s not as daunting a
proposition as it seems. Companies can take material steps in the ways they
incorporate and speak about the tech to foster trust at the employee and
customer levels, setting a strong foundation for long-term use.
As employees hone their AI skills and become aware of the
technology’s nuances, it will evolve into a tool that truly changes how jobs
are done across industries. Businesses would be wise to find gentle, but real
ways where they can foster in-house learning opportunities for employees to familiarize
themselves with the most relevant use cases.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Josh Blalock is the Chief Video Evangelist at Jabra?with over 20 years of experience in engineering and architecting Microsoft technologies, he has deep expertise in unified communications and video solutions. In his current role, Josh talks with customers, partners, and social circles about the Jabra video portfolio, and how it is evolving to meet the changing needs of the modern workplace. Josh is also a co-founder and board member of Comms vNext, a community-led conference that brings together Microsoft UC professionals and enthusiasts to learn and network.
