By Mo Cherif, Senior Director of Generative AI at Sitecore

2024 was marked by a significant growth in adoption of different trendy technologies - from GenAI to sophisticated AI-powered chatbots, these rapid innovations are not slowing down. 

2025 will be a year of widespread AI adoption and unparalleled opportunities across industries. One thing that is clear is that we will see a better understanding of the added value the technology brings. For marketers especially, the technology will have a more direct impact on how to increase ROI and improve digital experiences.

As MarTech continues to evolve, we can anticipate a dynamic landscape with shifts across workflows and routine tasks. To answer the new demands and needs of the workforce there are a few major trends to watch and reassess in the new year to accelerate business outcomes. 

The Real Starting Point for Agentic AI Becoming Mainstream

With agentic AI, individual agents will focus on specific capabilities. Each agent can do a specific task and do it well. These agents work together to achieve a common goal, so think of it as just like a team. You have a team of multiple people with different skills, and these teams are also structured - there are capabilities also shared across different teams - this is how agentic AI also works.

Agentic really mimics how we, as humans, work. It follows the idea of binding the human abilities and AI agents' capabilities together. Essentially, humans get to do what they do best, which is focusing on creativity and innovation, while AI does more of the grunt work. This includes data crunching and sorting through data much faster for example. 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.

AI will impact Modern Day Workflows Directly

AI is now integrated into every industry, and their workflows, so we can expect major changes in the way marketers work. I see two specific aspects where AI will have a major impact: how experience is going to be activated and how traditional marketing work gets done.

As marketing budgets shrink more and more every year, the expected outcomes do not decrease. AI can help across the whole content life cycle and - in fact - across the whole marketing life cycle.

We've seen glimpses of AI creating content variance, even grounded by a specific brand during 2024, but as the new year approaches, adaptation for brand and authors' voices, tones, nuances of topics will go far beyond what we've seen before. Advanced AI tools are about optimization, rather than just supporting one task (e.g., mere content drafts) these will focus on orchestration. Ultimately, while teams focus on the tasks or jobs to be done, AI has deliverables, and then each deliverable can have a set of subtasks, which can be assigned to humans or AI agents. This will be the initial time for real-world human-machine collaboration.

Reassessing the Chatbot Era, Worth The Investment?

Once generative AI was introduced, everyone raced to build their own chatbots. We saw this across industries - especially in retail, healthcare and travel - but we've already started to see the conversation and quick adoption of GenAI chatbots slow down and I expect that to continue.

One reason being a lack of trust for both companies and their customers. Customers do not trust that chatbots will give them accurate information, and in some cases, they do not feel comfortable sharing personal information with an AI-powered tool. Companies also do not trust AI to provide accurate, unbiased one-on-one interactions with their customers. GenAI does a great job of sorting, storing and filtering through mass amounts of data, but we have not reached a place where businesses are willing to give up their brand ownership to AI.

 If we're building something that people have not adapted to yet, it is just not going to work. In theory, the concept of chatbots sounds very interesting, but we've seen over and over and over again that people just don't trust AI chatbots in a lot of use cases.

AI continues to pave the path for transformation, but there is a lot still to come for digital experience. Organizations will need to invest in technologies that answer their unique needs, rather than falling for the next shiny thing - as we saw with all the underperforming chatbots created in 2024.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mo is the Senior Director of AI at Sitecore. With over 15 years of experience in the technology industry, he is a seasoned and visionary product strategy leader who specializes in digital experience and generative AI. In his role, he helps define and execute the product vision and roadmap, identify market opportunities and user needs, and manage the product lifecycle from ideation to launch. Prior to Sitecore, Mo held roles at DoZen and ITWORX.