Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025.  Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

By Jonathan LaCour and Ryan Ries of Mission Cloud

This year has been a year of exploration in the world of GenAI, with businesses globally latching on to the fledgling technology and identifying opportunities to optimize their business. This exploration has certainly been fruitful in determining which use cases lend themselves to transformation with GenAI. With 2024 being a year of exploration, 2025 will mark a critical transition to application, as first-movers begin to recognize the benefits of GenAI, while GenAI giants push the technology beyond its current limitations.

Hyperscalers and key players including OpenAI and Anthropic will deliver additional autonomy in the form of Agentic AI (AgAI), which enables complex, multi-stage workflows to be automated. LLMs will gain the ability to plan, breaking problems down into smaller chunks. AgAI also enables LLMs to evaluate their own output to refine and iterate in a process of self-learning. As such, AgAI LLMs will be able to collaborate with one another and call out to external APIs to take action. This advancement in Agentic frameworks will fundamentally transform how businesses operate, freeing up valuable human capital from repetitive tasks and allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives that drive real value.

While it's unlikely that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be achieved in 2025, AgAI is a critical step forward. While direct application of LLMs by businesses will continue, hyperscale public cloud vendors will rapidly improve their own cloud services with the help of AI, allowing their customers to harness the benefits of GenAI with less effort. For example, cloud operations offerings will become far more intelligent, with AI-powered anomaly detection and automated remediation that further reduces the operational burden of cloud workloads.

The workplace itself will continue to evolve, with virtual and augmented reality playing an increasingly important role in professional development and training. Taking cues from success stories like the NFL's use of VR for quarterback training, other industries will adopt immersive technologies to accelerate skill development and knowledge transfer. As VR devices become more accessible and user-friendly, we'll see a proliferation of virtual training programs across sectors, from healthcare to manufacturing.

Conversely, cloud service providers will need to react to emerging security and privacy challenges, as bad actors will attempt to leverage AI to perform automated social engineering, phishing, and deepfake scams. Such attacks have already been carried out in 2024, and the rapid pace of innovation in AI will only make these challenges more severe.

In short, 2025 has high potential for transformative shifts, good and bad, from the continued wave of innovation in AI. Businesses and cloud service providers will need to adapt to recognize the benefit of AI, and to protect themselves from emerging AI-enabled threats.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jonathan LaCour

Jonathan LaCour is the CTO of Mission Cloud, a Premier AWS Consulting Partner. Prior to joining Mission Cloud, Jonathan LaCour led Product & Technology teams at DreamHost, one of the largest web hosting and cloud computing providers. As CTO of Mission Cloud, Jonathan guides the development of Mission's product and platform, and shares his expertise on cloud trends and best practices. Jonathan is a Fellow in the Python Software Foundation and an advisor for several startups. Follow Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cleverdevil/.

Ryan Ries

Dr. Ryan Ries is the Chief AI & Data Scientist of Mission Cloud. He holds over 15 years of leadership experience in data and engineering, over 20 years of experience working with AI and 5+ years helping customers build their AWS data infrastructure and AI models. After earning his Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry at UCLA and Caltech, Dr. Ries has helped develop cutting-edge data solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense and a myriad of Fortune 500 companies.