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

By Colin Redbond, Global SVP for Product and Strategy, SS&C Blue Prism 

As we look toward 2025, generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is reshaping every market and industry, from retailers offering a more personalized customer experience to banks fighting financial crimes. The next phase is enterprise AI - a true vehicle for realizing the promise of gen AI, blending business strategy with advanced technology and driving continuous transformation across organizations. Companies investing in the next enterprise AI will benefit not only from gen AI but from a comprehensive suite of AI-powered automation tools purpose-built to reshape the workplace. 

By combining AI tools like gen AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) with orchestration, enterprise AI optimizes operations, boosts productivity, and upholds high standards of quality, security, and governance. This approach enables businesses to apply gen AI strategically across their operations, maximizing its potential impact. 

We anticipate three major trends that will define how industries leverage AI to meet future demands. 

The ultimate blend - gen AI, orchestration and automation 

AI will partner in creativity and decision-making, moving automation gains from pure efficiency tools to enable organizations to be more inventive, adaptive and customer focused. Welcome to workplace 5.0 - the next level of automation, emphasizing and strengthening the collaboration between humans and technology. This is where humans, AI, robotics and digital-integrated activity combine. 

Central to this is orchestration: with business process management (BPM) and other tools, organizations can integrate human and digital workflows end-to-end. The key to successful operations is no longer simply orchestrating human work but integrating work as a whole. This will bring together workflows, inputs, outputs and the resources that drive the work, humans, gen AI and enterprise agents to create a smarter, more collaborative, engaging and productive work environment. 

Enterprise AI will allow us to move on from the individual efficiency gains we have seen through the likes of ChatGPT, to a mature implementation of gen AI where leaders have the opportunity to revolutionize the end-to-end processes on a large scale. This shift will lead to more human-centric work, making enterprises more creative, adaptive and customer-focused.  

Working with enterprise AI agents  

The next evolution of gen AI's integration with the enterprise will make interactions feel more lifelike. This will be achieved through experiential interfaces, enabling humans to communicate with enterprise agents in natural language. We'll see this manifest in the form of copilot-like interfaces, which are posed to dramatically enhance productivity, drive innovation and transform industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and financial services.  

While AI agents are not new, 2025 will mark the rise in more advanced business agents with specialized knowledge on specific industries. These enterprise agents are not meant to replace human workers, but rather to function as coworkers that support and enhance performance. They will autonomously handle delegated tasks, continuously learning and improving through agentic AI. 

Previously, these tools required coding and a structured approach to building applications. Now, gen AI has leveled the playing field, allowing people to turn their ideas into reality through natural language prompts.  

Responsible deployment of enterprise AI 

More than 30% of AI decision-makers at enterprise firms say governance and risk are a major barrier to gen AI adoption, according to Forrester's July 2023 Artificial Intelligence Pulse Survey - Generative AI: What It, Means For Governance, Risk. As generative AI tools advance quickly, there's growing concern about their potential to create privacy and security risks. With the possible consequences of a rogue agent (rogue AI) such as business/supply chain disruption, reputational damages and customer loss, it's worth considering these concerns.  

Organizations will need enterprise-grade guardrails, succinct integrations of gen AI into critical workflows and a robust AI governance model that prioritizes transparency, documentation and bias prevention. This helps ensure that AI solutions enhance, not jeopardize, the business. 

Enterprise AI: turning potential into impact 

Enterprise AI will be the game-changer for organizations ready to get the most out of generative AI, applied strategically and effectively across their entire operations. As we look ahead to 2025, companies that embrace enterprise AI beyond isolated applications will gain unparalleled access to gen AI's benefits through integrated processes, such as combining RPA, orchestration and machine learning. This convergence will enable organizations to turn the potential of gen AI into tangible results, achieving the scale and impact that early AI applications only hinted at. The era of delivering on AI's promise across the enterprise has arrived. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As the global SVP of Product Strategy, Colin Redbond is responsible for driving SS&C Blue Prism's Intelligent Automation strategy, across a portfolio of products that includes Robotic Process Automation, Business Process Management, Intelligent Document Processing and Artificial Intelligence.