Click on the TV or stream your latest newscast and there is a good chance you’ll hear AI mentioned in some fashion. It’s clear AI remains prevalent today just as it has been for the past several years.
To some consumers – and businesses, alike – it may appear companies are exaggerating the significance of this emerging technology. AI this, AI that… The reality is that AI is here to stay and will play a massive role in the future of global technology, how consumers interact with it and the way businesses operate.
Allow me, then, to make five predictions on how emerging technology, including AI, and data and analytics advancements will help businesses meet their top challenges in 2025 – particularly how their technology investments will drive future growth.
Prediction #1: AI will enable omni-channel, interaction-based identity to maximize every customer’s experience and value.
Those companies that either adopt or expand use of AI will be able to identify and understand every device their customers are using, and the interactions of every channel. They will know how those lead to transactions on which accounts and how many of these accounts belong to a customer, or even how many customers are in a household. AI-assisted platforms will enable the mapping of that entire activity even faster, allowing companies to make better customer recommendations and create a more satisfying, friction-free buying experience.
In 2025, this will create a powerful new accelerant for what McKinsey calls “experience-based growth,” a strategic orientation that can reportedly boost customer value – specifically, share of wallet – by up to 10%.
Prediction #2: Brands will differentiate and delight with Gen AI and extreme customer insight.
There have long been data-driven CX strategies, but never with the autonomous power, or granular insights, that AI and new levels of predictive analytics will deliver in 2025. In a world with thousands of categories, millions of products and hundreds of millions of consumers, when an individual walks into a virtual storefront, a company will be able to make remarkably specific predictions. And they’ll get this level of granularity without needing a thousand-person operation or a billion-dollar data analytics budget.
Armed with those insights, AI-based agents will be able to create “concierge level” experiences, adapting to situations and opportunities in real time. For instance, a mid-level clothing retailer will now be able to provide, say, a Nordstrom-style tailor to follow a customer and advise them about suits on any number of factors, from their own style and fit to preferred pricing.
Prediction #3: Superior guardrails and governance will spur innovation.
Governance and compliance through silos will finally be a thing of the past. In 2025, the best data platforms will enable previously unheard-of levels (and ease) of the multi-party collaboration required for real innovation. Companies will have the confidence to provision, within one platform, multiple data sets that have multiple controls and protection mechanisms, either from a security perspective or a use case perspective.
Advances in AI and ML will automate the compliance, testing, documentation and other tasks which can occupy 40-50% of a developers’ time. With AI bringing a new level of automation to the developer toolkit, they’ll be freed up to do what they were hired to do: innovate.
Prediction #4: 2025 will be a RAG to riches AI story.
Those who doubt that the investment in AI will really pay off will start to become believers in 2025. The big economic benefits will come from workforce intensive use cases, routine tasks that may involve a thousand or more workflow permutations. There will be productivity boosts for documentations, test cases — the biggest value add immediately is human-in-the-loop internal efficiency use cases.
But we’ll also see great progress in agent-based use cases that will deliver massive workforce efficiencies. It’s challenging, because AI hallucinations are still there, and even a one percent miss ratio is too high. I expect to see greater reliability as more of a RAG-based approach is employed [Retrieval Augmented Generation]. It doesn’t just let your agent learn general knowledge from wherever. Organizations provide specific documentation for the agent to retrieve and learn from — 25 documents in this folder, the answers in these FAQs, these particular process guidelines, proprietary rule books and so on.
Prediction #5: There will be a new wave of Data and Analytics DIY.
The demand for self-service capabilities is going to continue, and cost efficiencies will grow as more effective DIY operation expands. But gone are the days where companies just automate a user interface. Three years ago, DIY meant, “Give me a low-code user interface so I can point and click… and point and click… and point and click.”
Now people are saying they can’t point and click their way to a great user experience, no matter how many clicks are reduced. That’s not what they want. They want the simplicity of talking, of prompting. These agents we’re talking about are going to deliver that.
Ultimately, I just have one more prediction to deliver – namely that, AI will continue to be part of corporations’ vernaculars in 2025 and beyond because this technology – when executed correctly – will undoubtedly make an impact on business’ bottom lines.
