Imagine a mash-up of “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report,” “Gattica” and “The Jetsons” in one world — this year and beyond.
The future is now, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) promises (threatens?) to open a brave new world of convenience, efficiency and agentic work forces. Or it threatens to serve up a dystopian stew of rampant bots, cybersecurity trapdoors and massive jobs displacement — depending on whom you talk to.
Those were among the themes in the aforementioned sci-fi movies and cartoon show. Yet perhaps the most chilling scenario came from the late 1970s cult classic movie, “Demon Seed,” in which a disembodied AI invention takes over a house and the people who live in it. The creation, named Proteus IV, increasingly issues threats and follows up on them.
Flash forward to this year, and a conversation between a Michigan college student and Google Gemini, which sent this message: “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
Fortunately, we haven’t reached that stage yet. But the great promise of AI comes with potential pitfalls, all of which were shared by dozens of executives, venture capitalists, industry analysts and AI developers for our recap of the year in AI.
It’s safe to say that the immediate future will be defined in great measure by a wave of AI agents from the likes of Microsoft Corp., Salesforce Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Adobe Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and others.
“2025 we will be awash in AI agents; every vendor will offer the ability to create them but what should customers use?” Mitch Ashley, vice president and the practice lead for DevOps and application development, at The Futurum Group, said in an email. “This will lead to the emergence of the next phase of generative AI — agent discovery, agent management, multi-agent orchestration, highly and narrowly specialized agents to find and fix problems, look for compliance issues, find agents consuming too many resources.”
Gartner predicts 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI within four years, and 2025 will mark the first year that enterprises know enough about AI to effectively create and budget for widespread adoption of the technology. This will require “a lot of education and innovation” to fully integrate the technology into businesses’ operations and employee workflows, says Mike Connell, chief operating officer at Enthought.
Corporate America is serious about GenAI. The four biggest tech companies are expected to spend $231 billion on AI this year, up 48% from a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal. To put that in perspective, consider comparative investments (in today’s dollars) for the U.S. Defense budget ($916 billion), Apollo program ($318 billion), Great Wall of China ($318 billion) and Manhattan project ($30 billion).
The AI Revolution is Here
The AI revolution, “the biggest tech transformation in over 40 years,” is at the start of $2 trillion in AI spending over the next few years, Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, said in a note Saturday. Leading the way are cloud/hyper-scale players such as Microsoft, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc., he added.
The top 50 AI startups so far have raised $52.8 billion, most of it the past two years, and they boast a collective valuation of more than $358 billion, as of October. OpenAI leads in investments with a staggering $21.9 billion, according to a study by WriterBuddy.ai.
Aggregators will play a crucial role in helping enterprises identify and implement the right AI solutions. But adoption of AI will come at dramatically different speeds, depending on the resources of organizations, creating what one analyst calls “The Great Enterprise Divide” over the next five years.
“On one side, there are digital-native organizations that have established the infrastructure to leverage GenAI to its full potential. They are joined by established players who have spent years addressing their legacy technology estates — these organizations will be the winners,” says Sam Duncan, a practice leader at HFS Research. “The other side is organizations playing catch-up, still battling technical and process debt. They might understand GenAI and its value, but they can’t yet harness it to its full potential.”
Craig Crisler, CEO of SupportNinja, is more stark. He says half of AI projects will “crash and burn” next year as companies underestimate the complexity of AI and overhype “quick wins.”
Those who get ahead will likely benefit from so-called “super agents” that serve as traffic cops to supervise other agents. “By the end of 2025, AI agents will cross the chasm from tools that require more hands-on supervision to fully autonomous systems,” says Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of AI and innovation at ServiceNow “Expect to see AI agents independently automating complex, multi-step processes without a human in the loop.”
GenAI will become an indispensable “apprentice” in the developer’s toolkit, automating bug fixes, testing and code optimization. According to O’Reilly, 51% of companies were already using AI-assisted development tools in 2023.
At the same time, robots powered by AI are emerging to perform low-level tasks such as high-rise window washing, household chores like dish washing and busing tables, and menial dental procedures.
The Dangers of Security
The biggest worry is, and remains, security. A laundry list of hazards — ransomware, hallucinations, fraud, lack of trust — are being assessed and addressed by overwhelmed IT managers and anxious executives who must answer to investors pushing for a quick AI transformation.
Ransomware attacks soared 81% in 2024 from 2023 and will significantly jump in 2025 because AI is “fueling the advancements of these threats,” warns Todd Thorsen, chief information security officer at CrashPlan.
Attackers also are increasingly moving laterally between cloud platforms and on-prem environments to evade detection, leading to a 75% increase in cloud intrusions over the past year.
This has put a premium on a holistic security platform that integrates runtime, posture management, identity and data security across hybrid environments, said Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike Inc.
To get a much deeper dive on the future of AI and security markets, and all things tech, please attend our upcoming Predict 2025 event on January 9th. You can register for free HERE.
