AI 2025 Forecast: Agents Dominate

This video is our second annual forecast for key trends or developments most likely to define the coming year for AI in the private sector.

By far, the biggest one is AI agents. If we had to choose just one development that is set to define AI next year, this would be it.

Using OpenAI to illustrate this, the video walks through the reasons why they might plausibly achieve their aspirational goal of growing from 250 million weekly active users to a billion users next year by offering AI agents that help people in their day-to-day tasks.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Anthropic, Google and Elon Musk (xAI) have all announced plans to launch AI agents of their own in the coming year, and the video explains why this is where the money is, so that’s why this is set to be a key trend for next year.

The other three trends covered are:

2. Further advances in Generative AI, including multi-modal applications that process images, audio or video, as well as text
3. A proliferation of lightweight models that perform well on edge devices at low cost, and
4. New or expanded use cases in robotics that go beyond repetitive manufacturing tasks