Agentic AI Will Be A Strategic Focus For 2025

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the top trends for technology executives over the past couple of years. In 2023 every manager was trying to find how they could use AI to change their business. This year there has been more maturity around the debate – instead of using the technology and searching for problems, now managers are more focused on tackling specific issues in their business.

But most corporate efforts around AI have focused on productivity and efficiency. Business leaders are using AI to either perform business processes faster or at a lower cost. Doing more in one day is always going to be helpful, but it is not changing the world.

Agentic AI promises to be that change.

Agentic AI is also known as autonomous AI. It’s a form of AI that can work independently of human intervention. In effect, your human employees can have one – or more – agents that work for them. You set the agent off on a task and it works on the problem until it is complete.

Agentic AI uses a number of techniques, such as machine learning, reinforcement learning, and large language models so the cognition of the agents is almost human – and constantly improving. It learns as it has more experience of your business.

Some ideas or examples of what you can do with Agentic AI include:

• Defining specific goals then asking the agent to perform this work
• Understanding and responding to natural language
• Data analysis and pattern recognition – finding trends in data
• Learning from experience so it improves with time

Agentic AI can effectively become a part of your workforce. A team of 100 can perform the same tasks as a team of 1,000 because the agents can work autonomously and report back to their human controllers.

AI use has boomed over the past couple of years, but autonomous AI still does feel like science fiction. However, the industry analyst Gartner has suggested that Agentic AI will be the most important technology trend of 2025 – not just one of the trends to watch, but the most important one.

“Agentic AI systems autonomously plan and take actions to meet user-defined goals,” said Gene Alvarez, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, as he revealed the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025 at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 in October this year.

Spending on AI will help drive a healthy increase in IT expenditure. Gartner said worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5.74 trillion in 2025, an increase of 9.3% from 2024. Not many mature industries are growing at almost 10% annually right now, but this is where IT is in 2025.

Agentic AI will eventually change how people work. Instead of focusing on a single task at a time, individual human employees will be able to manage a large team where they can delegate specific tasks to the team – without all the usual problems of managing a team of people. Agentic AI doesn’t ever ask for a pay rise or quit one day before a major deadline.

We need to start thinking much more along the lines of AI becoming an integral part of the workforce. It may even resemble workers that are working from home and connecting remotely – the Agentic AI may use exactly the same method to connect into your systems.

This also means that digital literacy has to be improved. Human employees need to understand how to use their agents, how to give them the information they need to perform a task effectively, and how to help them learn. The employees are not being entirely replaced, but employees that struggle to operate alongside AI may find it difficult in this brave new world of work.

Agentic AI will be one of the key areas of AI to watch for in 2025.

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