Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating at an astonishing pace, quickly moving from emerging technologies to impacting how businesses run. From building AI agents to interacting with technology in ways that feel more like a natural conversation, AI technologies are poised to transform how we work.
But what exactly lies ahead? We'd like to share five key themes for AI in 2025 that undoubtedly come with challenges for businesses but also the potential to redefine what's possible. Ready to glimpse into next year and beyond? Let's dive in.
1. Agentic AI: Goodbye Agent Washing, Welcome Multi-Agent Systems
AI agents are currently in their infancy. While many software vendors are releasing and labeling the first "AI agents" based on simple conversational document search, advanced AI agents that will be able to plan, reason, use tools, collaborate with humans and other agents, and iteratively reflect on progress until they achieve their objective are on the horizon. The year 2025 will see them rapidly evolve and act more autonomously. More specifically, 2025 will see AI agents deployed more readily "under the hood," driving complex agentic workflows.
Users will interact with a copilot for their tasks, which will deploy the request and coordinate among systems of multiple expert AI agents to complete more difficult tasks. Future AI agents, or multi-agent systems (MAS), can collaborate to understand the business user, have all the context, and structure the problem to subsequently interact with these domain-specific expert AI agents - each performing specific sub-tasks that together complete a much more complex task. In the future, users will not even need to trigger an action. Instead, AI agents will proactively respond to business events such as incoming customer inquiries, supply chain disruptions, or demand surges. They will automatically prepare a decision workflow as far as they can before pinging the human user for feedback.
If we look at a five-year horizon, AI agents will simplify significant portions of workflows, even aspects that have been resistant to automation, such as exceptions in customer service, long-tail administrative tasks, and specific programming activities like coding or debugging software. AI agents will be flexible and can plan, fail, and try something else or self-correct based on reasoning. AI agents will handle and complete routine, repetitive tasks end-to-end as effectively and often even more effectively than humans, leading to increased productivity and demonstrable cost savings. Agents will be more adaptable and robust than conventional robotic process automation (RPA) for longtail and highly extensive tasks. This means figuring out the best result out of many possible outcomes, which is almost impossible to hardcode in an RPA algorithm with classical automation methods.
Adopting AI in these domains will also shift workforce dynamics, with human roles evolving to focus on anticipating uncommon scenarios, coping with ambiguity, factoring in human behavior, making strategic decisions, and driving genuine innovation - complemented, not replaced, by AI capabilities.
In short, AI will handle mundane, high-volume tasks while the value of human judgement, creativity, and quality outcomes will increase.
2. Models: No Context, No Value
Large language models (LLMs) will continue to become a commodity for vanilla generative AI tasks, a trend that has already started. LLMs are drawing on an increasingly tapped pool of public data scraped from the internet. This will only worsen, and companies must learn to adapt their models to unique, content-rich data sources. Model improvements in the future won't come from brute force and more data; they will come from better data quality, more context, and the refinement of underlying techniques. Companies must spend more time innovating to make better models through fine-tuning and model adaptation rather than just training larger and larger models. Neurosymbolic AI techniques, especially knowledge graph, will see a renaissance since they can provide both learning objectives for foundation models and context to significantly improve the performance of generative AI while reducing hallucinations.
We will also see a greater variety of foundation models that fulfill different purposes. Take, for example, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which generate outcomes based on predictions grounded in physical reality or robotics. PINNs are set to gain more importance in the job market because they will enable autonomous robots to navigate and execute tasks in the real world, from warehouses to manufacturing plants, or models trained on tabular, structured data, like SAP Foundation Model, and can handle tasks that LLMs cannot do well, like predictions of numeric values.
Models will increasingly become more multimodal, meaning an AI system can process information from various input types. AI applications will eventually evolve into "any-to-any" modality solutions capable of understanding, processing, and reasoning across text, voice, image, video, and sensor data within a single model. In addition, smaller and more specialized LLMs with scalable finetuning techniques and the ability to work on any device will become more common, a trend that may lead to hyper-personalized models for organizations or even individuals in the future.
Enterprises will shift toward strategies utilizing multiple foundation models (not to be confounded with multimodal capabilities in a single model, described above), leveraging a diverse set of AI models and techniques tailored to specific use cases. This is backed by the trend of fine-tuning small slices of models, which requires fewer resources and much less data, resulting in full model flexibility and enabling businesses to extract more value from their unique data and gain a competitive edge. Enterprise software vendors will offer or extend integrated AI model marketplaces and platforms that support seamless model deployment, management, and updating. Benchmarking and lowering model switching costs will help deploy the same use cases in heterogeneous environments. Context equals value. Knowledge graph technology has been around for 40 years and is now seeing a revival because it can overcome key LLM challenges, such as understanding complex formats, hierarchy, and relationships between business data. Knowledge graphs offer data meaning and explain the relationship between entities, significantly supercharging the abilities of LLMs. The next step in this journey will be large graph models, allowing further advancement in generative AI.
Implicit knowledge is power, and making knowledge explicit to others is a superpower.
3. Adoption: From Buzz to Business
While 2024 was all about introducing AI use cases and their value for organizations and individuals alike, 2025 will see the industry's unprecedented adoption of AI specifically for businesses. More people will understand when and how to use AI, and the technology will mature to the point where it can deal with critical business issues such as managing multi-national complexities. Many companies will also gain practical experience working for the first time through issues like AI-specific legal and data privacy terms (compared to when companies started moving to the cloud 10 years ago), building the foundation for applying the technology to business processes.
From a technological perspective, while 2024 saw significant advancements in AI, 2025 will see companies focus on making these advancements more meaningful through seamless data integration, ultimately enhancing the accuracy and significance of AI-powered outcomes and boosting adoption. Lastly, in 2025, we might glimpse a shift in the software business model from building static software features and functions to an outcome-as-a-service model focused on achieving process objectives.
4. User Experience: AI Is Becoming the New UI
AI's next frontier is seamlessly unifying people, data, and processes to amplify business outcomes. In 2025, we will see increased adoption of AI across the workforce as people discover the benefits of humans plus AI.
This means disrupting the classical user experience from system-led interactions to intent-based, people-led conversations with AI acting in the background. AI copilots will become the new UI for engaging with a system, making software more accessible and easier for people. AI won't be limited to one app; it might even replace them one day. With AI, frontend, backend, browser, and apps are blurring. This is like giving your AI "arms, legs, and eyes." While power users will still have singular, expert interfaces, most users will demand flexibility across multiple access patterns. At the same time, there will be a growing acceptance of longer inference times for high-quality answers to complex, previously unsolvable problems and actions in domains requiring deep analysis and research. Ultimately, users will recognize the trade-off between latency and complexity of tasks handled by AI.
Importantly, we will see organizations move beyond viewing AI as a collection of productivity tools and begin reimagining their workforce as a network of collaborative intelligence with AI agents and humans working to accelerate innovation within the enterprise. For example, combining human expertise in strategic thinking with AI's strengths in large-scale analysis and pattern recognition will create new competitive advantages for companies that effectively orchestrate these hybrid intelligence networks to drive breakthrough discoveries and market opportunities. Next year will also mark the early stages of a significant shift in how humans and AI work together, with agents evolving into workflow partners, taking initial steps toward independently navigating software environments and automating routine tasks - from data analysis and report generation to schedule coordination and software testing. This will also start a longer journey toward transformed work processes and patterns, with forward-thinking organizations developing new roles, metrics, and training approaches for effective human-AI task collaboration.
5. Regulation: Innovate, Then Regulate
It's fair to say that governments worldwide are struggling to keep pace with the rapid advancements in AI technology and to develop meaningful regulatory frameworks that set appropriate guardrails for AI without compromising innovation. The regulatory landscape will become even more fragmented, with the OECD AI Policy Observatory tracking hundreds of AI regulations under discussion worldwide. This requires evaluating model compliance with and technical interpretation of various regulatory frameworks.
In 2025, the discussion will shift from what we try to regulate from a technical standpoint to how we innovate and what we deem fundamentally human. This discussion will elevate the role of humans, contribute a much more positive perspective, and help shape a long-term vision for how we want humanity and AI to live and work together.
In this environment, it will continue to be critical for companies developing and deploying AI technology to adhere to responsible principles around safety, security, and ethical use. This will also help set the stage for important precedents and compliance.
Executing on the Themes in 2025
Indeed, these are just a few of what we are sure will be many exciting advancements for AI in 2025. Overall, the biggest takeaway from the year ahead will be making existing breakthrough technology more meaningful. We will see AI much deeper and almost invisibly embedded in consumer and enterprise applications and witness more advancements in how vendors and organizations that use these applications embed their individual contexts and data into AI seamlessly.
Getting to the point of leveraging AI generally, however, will require businesses to take advantage of a modern cloud suite with unified data access and harmonized data models to overcome data silos and fully benefit from AI innovation that spans across the whole enterprise. This will drastically increase the accuracy and significance of AI-powered outcomes, ultimately boosting adoption, specifically in the enterprise space.
We can't wait to see what the future holds.
Sean Kask is vice president and head of AI Strategy for SAP Business AI at SAP. Walter Sun is senior vice president and global head of AI for SAP Business AI at SAP. Jonathan von Rueden is head of AI Frontrunner Innovation for SAP Business AI at SAP.
