The Top Three Automation Predictions For 2025

AI can provide data, identify patterns, and even suggest solutions, but it doesn’t inherently generate the kind of imaginative questions that drive breakthrough discoveries. It is the human mind, with its capacity for abstraction and intuition, that transforms AI outputs into meaningful scientific insights. Cognitive agility turns AI from a passive assistant into an interactive “thought partner,” responsive to the scientist’s creative direction.

I was surprised to find no mention of smart cars or smart cities, little about programming automation, no real mention of biotechnology or healthcare, and little detailed focus on anything related to green energy. The company predicts that within three years, “Organizations that implement comprehensive AI governance platforms will experience 40% fewer AI-related ethical incidents compared to those without such systems.” The citizen developer train continues to roll and now includes genAI-infused automation apps.

Welcome to the age of agentic AI, where companies that grow and thrive will focus on the most important business currencies of trust, speed, scale, and personalization, while also dealing with the balance between automation and meaningful work. Looking ahead, enhanced collaboration between asset managers, data providers and regulators will drive the development of standardised ESG reporting frameworks. Leveraging AI and ML will refine data accuracy – enabling investors to make better-informed decisions – while blockchain may offer transparency in ESG compliance, shaping a future of accountable, climate-conscious investments.

Out of all the AI agent discussion, businesses will find only moderate success, mostly in less critical employee support applications. GenAI’s ability to create autonomous, unstructured workflow patterns and adapt to the dynamic nature of real-world processes will have to wait. Traditional integration projects often took months to implement and were difficult to modify. Agent orchestration introduces a level of flexibility previously impossible, allowing organizations to adapt their operations rapidly as market conditions change. This agility is becoming a critical differentiator in competitive markets where customer expectations evolve rapidly. In the 2000s, the EAI market was led by major players like IBM with WebSphere, Microsoft’s BizTalk Server, and Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, all of which provided robust tools for connecting diverse systems.

Agentic AI Systems

In essence, agentic AI is designed to mimic human-like agency, allowing it to act and react in ways that are more flexible, adaptable and intelligent. Expect to see adoption in vertical solutions, where the headsets solve specific professional problems. Then there’s the whole virtual monitor and entertainment center application, which could replace peoples’ needs for large TVs (especially those who travel or live in tight quarters) and for big monitors for computing use. There is one statement in Gartner’s announcement that I just don’t find fully credible. It says, “In 2024, the leading consideration for most IT organizations is their carbon footprint.” Nope, I don’t think so. With the boom in AI, the ongoing extreme nature of cyberthreats, and just the need to get solutions deployed, it’s unlikely that IT organizations can be characterized as making their carbon footprint their top priority.

This transformation extends beyond customer service into every aspect of enterprise operations. In financial services, agent orchestration is revolutionizing fraud detection by continuously learning from transactions across multiple systems. Instead of rigid rule-based integrations, intelligent agents adapt their monitoring patterns based on emerging threat vectors, significantly reducing false positives while catching sophisticated fraud attempts that traditional systems might miss. Early adopters are reporting significant improvements in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and market responsiveness.

It’s no secret that as a result of the AI revolution, we’re seeing enterprises, both small and large, aspire to be autonomous with augmented intelligence. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) and LLMs has been a transformative step to get closer to this vision. Collectively, AI, GenAI and agentic AI are poised to be one of the most disruptive technological transformations of our time.

So I hired one assistant to help with my podcast and a second one to help create social media posts. Problems with automated trading algorithms show just how costly this can be in business. In 2012, Knight Capital almost went bankrupt after its new program made $440 million in bad trades in just forty-five minutes. Recent Salesforce research, based on a survey of 150 CIOs of companies with more than 1,000 employees, also found that companies are looking for their CIOs to be AI experts. The role of the CIO now is much more than delivering access to trustworthy, relevant, timely, and impactful information — these are table-stakes requirements.

AI gets real in managing asset performance

Sustained interest and experimentation in AI will support learning and steady progress in 2025. Generative AI (genAI) and edge intelligence will drive robotics projects that will combine cognitive and physical automation, for example. Citizen developers will start to build genAI-infused automation apps, leveraging their domain expertise. In the era of AI, global enterprises are discovering that conventional EAI can no longer keep pace with the demands of real-time business operations.

With AI in the hands of bad actors, it’s not hard to predict an even more serious rise in very credible-seeming disinformation. AI governance is an umbrella term used to describe frameworks for managing these challenges. This is all about trust, accountability, and the legal and ethical underpinnings of AI systems.

Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is a type of therapy developed to improve sleep and sleep-related anxiety. Researchers have found that CBT-I can be an effective treatment option for insomnia. There certainly are challenges around agentic AI like data security, ethics and biases and explainability. But as the agents get more sophisticated, these challenges will be overcome.

What’s your favorite future trend?

The emergence of standardized protocols for agent communication and data handling ensures that autonomous operations maintain compliance with regulatory requirements. These standards are crucial for industries like banking and healthcare, where data privacy and security cannot be compromised even as systems become more autonomous. The impact of automation bias is profound, influencing decisions in critical sectors, potentially leading to catastrophic outcomes if not adequately addressed. As part of UOB’s responsible financing policy, we conduct due diligence checks on new and existing corporate customers for material ESG risks and their track record in sustainability.

Medications should only be considered for short-term use in people with chronic insomnia when CBT-I alone isn’t working. Sleep drive can be increased by short-term restriction or compression of the amount of time you spend in bed. It’s “not sleep deprivation, but restoring the normal sleep schedule,” Miller explained. One of the first things therapists do to treat chronic insomnia is try to change patients’ thinking about sleep, particularly feelings of guilt and anxiety about not sleeping. About 30 percent of adults live with some type of insomnia, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). Chronic insomnia — defined as sleeplessness that occurs at least three times per week for at least 3 months — affects about 10 percent of adults.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This way, customers can receive clearer and more accurate and transparent reports, making it easier for them to track their investments’ impact. While digital touch points are growing, insurance is a people business and the personal connections ChatGPT App established by our financial representatives remain valuable for complex insurance needs. Gartner claims that one of the trends to watch is the use of technologies that “read and decode brain activity” to improve human cognitive abilities.

As more self-service options become available, FIs will need to constantly innovate to keep up with evolving customer behaviours and deepen trust-based relationships. Building on this, in 2020, we developed the responsible data-use model comprising the Pure framework and a model governance framework that guides how data would be utilised by analytical models. Additionally, our senior-level committee oversees AI use cases to ensure legal compliance and ethical integrity. UOB’s approach for GenAI adoption balances the need for governance with the speed to value. We leverage commercial GenAI apps such as Microsoft 365 Copilot to demonstrate early value, while concurrently establishing a solid foundation platform with guard rails and risk-mitigation capabilities for custom GenAI apps.

By shifting their approaches based on AI-generated insights, these scientists weren’t just responding to AI suggestions; they were actively shaping them, using AI as an extension of their creative process. GenAI innovations, edge intelligence, and advancing communication services are encouraging developers of physical robotics to take a fresh look at embodied AI. This will enable robots to sense and respond to their environment instead of following preprogrammed rules and workflows, exposing them to more complex and unpredictable situations. Decision-makers in asset-intensive industries will begin to see value in the combination and invest in physical automation projects to enhance their operational efficiencies. Despite obvious benefits and enthusiasm, these implementation challenges will hinder 2025 gains.

He pointed to ExxonMobil’s live plant using OPA technology in Baton Rouge, La., in which the company is cutting loops over from the plant’s legacy system to the OPA system. While running both systems currently, ExxonMobil expects to be running fully on the OPA system before the end of the year. I delegate to technology as much as possible to save brain power—and it doesn’t have to be fancy AI. In my TEDx talk, I noted that we have approximately 6,200 thoughts each day. So the more of that mental load you can hand off, the more capacity you have for the projects that make you money in your business.

• AI’s potential will always reflect the ingenuity and cognitive sophistication of its user.
• The conversations around chatbots and other tools enabled by large language models (LLMs) focus primarily on digital applications and little on the physical challenges that AI can address.
• The closest we might get is hanging VR bricks off our faces, and even that has a very low uptake compared to most other productivity technologies.
• We are developing GenAI digital assistants trained on UOB’s products and services to work alongside our front-line employees who deal with thousands of inquiries from customers daily.

It strongly recommends deeper research into building cryptography techniques that can survive in a world where quantum computing is available. Since then, they’ve embarked on a 14-year (and counting) journey to enlist others in the industry to think similarly about open process automation. The initial Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS) was a significant milestone. This year, they released version 2.1 of the standard, which DeBari said created an open architecture from which they could build systems. He was also quick to point out that the technologies involved in open process automation aren’t new, but many are well proven within the IT realm.

Polyfunctional robots

Every year around this time, well-regarded analyst group Gartner releases its list of top 10 strategic technology trends for the upcoming year. “We want to take automation from closed and propriety to open and standards based, because we need innovation. We need to be able to do the technology insertion at any time, because we are being asked every day for value creation,” DeBari said. He pointed to emerging technologies, such as virtualization, that people will want to add to their automation systems.

We also estimate customers’ carbon footprint based on their card spending, offering tips on reducing emissions and the option to offset unavoidable ones by purchasing carbon credits. Through natural language prompts, or verbal instructions directly from customers, the digital assistants can analyse the sentiments of the customer and suggest relevant, concise responses. This complements employees’ efforts to deliver consistent quality service to our customers more quickly, accurately and smoothly. In 2023, we generated over 240 GenAI ideas, with 20 currently in implementation. One key initiative is the CSO (customer service officer) Assistant, which we developed in-house and piloted last year.

I even like coming up with fun ideas for social media posts (if I could just have a drone follow me around to record B-roll, that would be great). Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space. As we continue to integrate AI into scientific discovery, medicine, art, and countless other fields, it is crucial to remember that the “secret ingredient” is not the algorithm but the human ability to think deeply and creatively.

When individuals rely too heavily on automation, they may become less vigilant and less likely to critically assess the situation. This overreliance can dull human intuition and expertise, which are often necessary to navigate complex or novel situations. Automation bias has been cited as a factor in real-world crashes, too, including the tragic losses of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in 1972 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009. One high-profile example is a deepfake of President Joe Biden, which falsely depicts him telling people not to vote. This type of content, if unchecked, could damage public trust in the democratic process.

Timeline Speculation

The analyst firm says that new technologies such as the aforementioned optical, neuromorphic, and novel accelerators may use substantially less memory. We do have a few years before your run-of-the-mill crook ChatGPT gains access to quantum computing tech. Today, Gartner isn’t seeing much formal work in this area but predicts that by 2028, a full half of enterprises will have systems that fight against these attacks.

• We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.
• Automation bias refers to our tendency to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.
• Digital platforms can also facilitate green investments by providing customers with insights on sustainable options.
• The advent of generative AI (GenAI) and LLMs has been a transformative step to get closer to this vision.
• AI governance is an umbrella term used to describe frameworks for managing these challenges.

Polling also indicates public awareness of AI’s potential harm, with one poll showing that almost half Americans fear AI could attack humanity. Conducted by YouGov, the survey revealed how Americans felt computer intelligence stacked up against human intelligence, and highlighted concerns over a possibility of conflict between man and machine. First, SMEs receive foundational training, advisory and support in developing sustainability strategies, including guidance on implementation and tracking. These are complemented by face-to-face consultations with our wealth-planning managers, who leverage the insights to help customers take targeted steps towards achieving their financial goals.

If you’re growing a small business, there will come a time to hire a bigger team if you want to scale. And when your own brain is optimized first, you can fully leverage all the benefits of that extra support when it happens. Automation can mean routines and habits (think small shifts like biohacking). Automation can even mean a bit of preplanning so you have less to think about when you get to your desk. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service. In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service.

We are developing GenAI digital assistants trained on UOB’s products and services to work alongside our front-line employees who deal with thousands of inquiries from customers daily. We are also building our own generative AI (GenAI) platform with guard rails, and experimenting with multiple use cases in the areas of customer experience, the review of environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks, and tech development. In one of my earlier articles, I highlighted how generative AI is creating a new paradigm in the form of systems of intelligence, bridging the gap between systems of record and systems of engagement. The rise of agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration is accelerating the need to build the systems of intelligence within the enterprise. The real promise of AI lies in its ability to improve human decision-making. By implementing strategies that emphasize the complementary roles of humans and machines, organizations can enhance decision-making processes, ensuring that they are both efficient and resilient.

Gartner doesn’t really define the form those robots will take, or what kinds of tasks they will perform, but it estimates that 80% of people in 2030 will “engage with smart robots on a daily basis.” Going forward, Gartner says data centers won’t simply look like racks of basic servers but will be a mix of a wide range of technologies, what is cognitive automation deployed based on need and performance requirements. While no decisions are coming out of AI agents today, Gartner predicts that a good 15% of “day-to-day work decisions” will be made by AI agents by 2028. ExxonMobil may have spearheaded the quest for open process automation, but it is not alone in the pursuit.

So, as more dynamic capabilities continue to emerge, thoughts of open architecture have taken hold. ExxonMobil realized in 2010 that it had an obsolescence issue, and technology leaders at the company knew they needed to fix the slow rate of technology insertion into its automation systems. Every decision you make—from what to eat for breakfast to how you’re going to market a new program—drains some of that power. Top-performing scientists appear to be using AI not to replicate known methods but to take creative risks, formulating and testing ideas that might otherwise remain theoretical.

To enhance the customer experience for our consumer and wealth banking clients, we are also developing GenAI ideas in co-pilot mode, in wealth advisory, customer service, and sales. Let’s look at the example of applying agentic AI to IT operations (a.k.a. AIOps, observability and automation). ITOps use cases involve descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and cognitive phases, leveraging real-time telemetry data. What makes ITOps use cases challenging is dealing with the “data value gap.” Dealing with volume, velocity, veracity and variety of the telemetry data and generating the desired context becomes very challenging.

TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks and webMethods (later acquired by Software AG) specialized in real-time data integration, while BEA WebLogic and SAP NetWeaver enabled seamless application connections. Overcoming this automation bias requires a conscious effort to balance the benefits of automation with the invaluable insights of human judgment. Red teaming offers a number of tools that can help with this by fostering critical analysis and challenging the complacency that can arise from overreliance on automated systems. That said, this promise comes with notable risks such as AI “hallucinations” and algorithmic biases that must be managed. To achieve both the efficiency gains AI promises and maintain the trust needed in financial services, it is crucial to strike a balance between automation and human oversight, which may require a human-in-the-loop approach to maintain accountability.