You may not have started thinking about your Christmas shopping yet, but I bet you’ve been thinking about what artificial intelligence (AI) for business is going to look like in 2025. If it doesn’t, then settle in with a glass of mulled wine, because now’s your chance.
AI has made giant strides in recent years and is currently one of the biggest growth opportunities for businesses. With capabilities to intelligently automate administrative tasks, take on customer service tasks, and analyze masses of data, the benefits are endless. But there’s still plenty of room to grow, in ways that may or may not surprise you.
Enter the Year of AI for Business
Just like your list of New Year’s resolutions, the regulatory landscape is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of technology companies. For AI development to thrive in 2025, there must be an enabling environment. There is no denying the appetite for AI, with more than 120 AI bills currently before the US Congress. These are based on regulations already in force, like the European AI lawwhich promotes the rapid adoption of trusted AI through reduced administrative burdens for SMEs and clear requirements for the use of AI.
European AI law defines AI systems according to their level of risk, dividing them into prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk and minimal-risk groups. This is something we could see changing in 2025, with the possibility of new legislation focused on AI classification rather than risk. This approach would take into account criteria such as the intended uses and basic properties of AI systems.
New legislation coming into force next year will have a significant impact on how businesses can use AI. Data management is an area likely to receive significant legislative attention, ensuring that AI does not compromise the security and privacy of business and customer data.
AI Developments – The Weird and the Wonderful
As the new legislation rolls out in 2025, it will give businesses and developers more freedom and security to expand the reach of AI. Many of us have already integrated AI into our processes, but what will we integrate next?
- Leading the way – Microsoft
Tech giant Microsoft is one of the companies leading the way in AI development in 2024. At its recent Ignite 2024 event, the company made several announcements demonstrating the acceleration of AI in 2025. One was that Microsoft Teams would allow participants to speak in the language of their choice, thanks to its new AI-based interpretation feature. By facilitating global communication and collaboration, AI is a powerful way to fuel business growth.
Microsoft also announced the introduction of its AI agents this year. These agents will drive organization-wide optimization and automation by collaborating with workers, a step forward from the AI assistants we already have. Agents can be trained to know your organization inside and out and can compile details for sales pitches and presentations while you focus on more important tasks.
- Reduce costs with automation
Like AI agents, other AI systems relying on trigger-based automation will thrive in 2025. Once the system is informed of a trigger, such as a received email, it can digest information and provide an automated response to the trigger. Automated AI will integrate seamlessly into business processes, taking over administrative tasks, freeing up time for workers at all levels of the business so they can spend more time with the customers and focus on their long-term needs.
The rise of automated AI requires a focus on responsible use. Automation means that AI could be exposed to confidential data and, without appropriate safeguards, could learn that data and share it without authorization. Legislation will play a key role in ensuring responsible and ethical use of AI, but it is also the responsibility of business leaders to ensure that AI adoption goes hand in hand with education. It is important to understand that we will always include a human in the loop and ensure full observability of these interactions with AI.
AI-based systems can create new opportunities for businesses, but they lose their value and customer trust if they are inaccurate. To prioritize the accuracy of the models that AI systems are trained on, we will see a shift in the new year in how this process works. Basing a model on accurate and secure data is extremely important. The better the data, the more accurate the answers will be. Developers can synthesize their training data on large language models and then train the AI system on a small language model.
This will confirm the accuracy of the AI system, but as it adds degrees of complexity, it also poses a risk of potential bias or incorrect activity, such as the concept of AI hallucination. When AI produces information as if it were real, without any data to back it up, it’s a sign that something is wrong with the training data. Although 2025 will be an important year for the development of training models, companies must be aware of how their AI systems are trained to avoid bias and unethical practices.
Not just a New Year’s resolution
The huge amount of investment planned in 2025 is just one sign that AI is not a fleeting New Year’s resolution. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have made long-term commitments to invest in the development of AI, because they know that we are still exploiting its full portfolio of capabilities. Even if they are not currently taking advantage of AI, there is no doubt that the future will be rich. But it’s not just a game for big players: small businesses will also stake their claim by adopting and investing in AI.
With the developments we will see next year in the areas of automation, robotics and training data, it is certain that a large number of companies that have not yet explored AI will be looking to adopt it. To make the most of new developments, don’t wait until New Year’s Day to get started, contact the experts now to help your business become AI-ready.
Chris Huntingford is the new Director of AI at YEARa digital transformation provider and Microsoft Services Partner of the Year 2024 in the UK. Headquartered in Manchester, it provides public and private cloud, security, business applications, low code and data services to thousands of customers, from enterprises to SMEs and public sector organisations. .