You might 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 you haven’t, then settle in with a glass of mulled wine, because now is your chance.
AI has come leaps and bounds over the past few years and is currently one of the biggest opportunities for business growth. With capabilities to intelligently automate admin tasks, take on customer service tasks, and analyse masses of data, the advantages are endless. But there’s still lots of room for development, in ways which will and won’t surprise you.
Stepping into the year of AI for business
Like your list of New Year’s Resolutions, the regulation landscape is constantly changing and adapting to the needs of tech businesses. For AI development to thrive in 2025, there must be a supportive environment ready for it. There’s no denying the appetite for AI, with over 120 bills on AI currently before the United States Congress. These build upon regulations already in place, such as the EU AI Act, which promotes the rapid adoption of trustworthy AI through reduced administrative burdens for SMEs and clear requirements for AI use.
The EU AI Act defines AI systems by their risk rating, splitting them up into prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk, and minimal-risk groups. This is something we could see changing in 2025, with the potential for new legislation focusing on AI classification over risk. This approach would consider criteria such as the intended uses and basic properties of AI systems.
New legislation coming into effect next year will significantly impact how businesses can use AI. Data management is one area likely to see substantial legislative focus, ensuring that AI does not compromise the security and privacy of business and customer data.
AI developments – The weird and the wonderful
As new legislation is rolled out in 2025, it will give businesses and developers more freedom and safety to largen AI’s scope. Many of us will already have AI ingrained into our processes, but what will we be bringing on board next?
- Leading the way – Microsoft
One company which has been leading the way in AI development in 2024 has been tech giant Microsoft. At its recent Ignite 2024 event, it made several announcements which demonstrate the acceleration of AI in 2025. One of these was that Microsoft Teams will let participants speak in a language of their choice, through its new AI-powered Interpreter feature. Facilitating global communication and collaboration, this is one powerful way in which AI will fuel business growth.
Microsoft also announced the introduction of its AI agents this year. These agents will drive organisational wide optimisation and automation by collaborating with workers, a step forward from the AI assistants we already have. Agents can be trained to know your organisation from top to bottom and can compile details for business pitches and presentations whilst you focus on more valuable tasks.
- Cutting corners with automation
Like AI agents, other AI systems which rely on trigger-based automation will flourish in 2025. Once the system is notified of a trigger, such as an email being received, it can digest the information and deliver an automated response to the trigger. Automated AI will seamlessly slot into business processes, taking care of admin tasks which frees up time for workers in all levels of the business to spend more time with customers and focus on their long-term needs.
The rise of automated AI poses a need for focus on responsible usage. Automation means that AI could be exposed to confidential data, and without the right protection measures in place, could learn that data and share it without authorisation. Legislation will play a key role in ensuring the responsible and ethical use of AI, but responsibility lies with business leaders as well to make sure that AI adoption goes hand in hand with education. Its important to understand that we will always include a human in the loop and full observability of these interactions with AI.
AI-powered systems might be forging new opportunities for businesses, but they lose their value and customer trust if inaccurate. To prioritise the accuracy of the models AI systems are trained on, we will see a shift in the New Year on how this process works. Grounding an model in accurate, secure data is extremely important. The better he data the more accurate the responses will be. Developers may synthesise their training data on large language models, and then train the AI system on a small language model.
This will approve the accuracy of the AI system, but as it adds degrees of complexity, it also poses the risk of potential bias or incorrect activity, such as the AI hallucination concept. When AI produces information like it is fact without any data to back it up, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong with the training data. Whilst 2025 will be a big year for the development of training models, businesses need to be aware of how their AI systems are being trained to avoid bias and unethical practice.
Not just a New Year’s Resolution
The huge amount of investment in 2025 is just one of many signs that AI isn’t a fleeting New Year’s Resolution. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have made a long-term commitment to investing in AI development, because they know we’re still unlocking its full portfolio of capabilities. Even if they’re not profiting off AI right now, it’s undoubtable that the future is rich. But this isn’t just a game for the big players, small businesses will also be staking their claim by adopting and investing in AI.
With the developments we’ll see next year in automation, robotics, and training data, it’s certain that there’ll be a flurry of businesses who haven’t explored AI yet looking to adopt. To make the most of the new developments, don’t wait until New Year’s Day to get started, reach out to the experts now to help your business get AI ready.
Chris Huntingford is the newly-promoted director of AI at ANS, a digital transformation provider and Microsoft’s UK Services Partner of the Year 2024. Headquartered in Manchester, it offers public and private cloud, security, business applications, low code, and data services to thousands of customers, from enterprise to SMB and public sector organisations.
