Boardroom to Living Room: How AI will lead in 2025

A lot has happened in 2024 in AI space, however, most of us are still unsure how to create an AI edge/Identity for ourselves, to stay relevant and possibly leverage AI for success. Companies are still wondering on how & what to build, market, sell, monetize AI features. Individuals including developers are figuring out what/how to learn/leverage to be the hot commodity in the market.

As we approach 2025, 2 key questions remain...

• Will AI takeaway my job?
• Will an AI hyper-scalar make my business obsolete?

In this article, I attempted to address these questions towards the end. Before getting to the conclusion, article builds the context on industries that will be disrupted, top innovations that will disrupt them and finally what can a company or individual do to stay on top of the disruptions. We’ll review how AI will be a catalyst for many revolutionary changes next year and how you & I can navigate the landscape to lead and not be left behind.

1. What industries will be disrupted in 2025

Above video from one week ago, sums it up... AI Agents are changing the business as we know it - Whats changing, how to adopt, how to evolve is the primary concern for CEOs, CTOs & leadership... Not just SaaS, but there are whole bunch of other industries that will be disrupted as listed below...

1.1 Below functions will be disrupted big time in 2025..

• Customer Support and Call Centers: AI agents managing queries, troubleshooting, and real-time support.
• Data Entry and Processing Services: Automation of repetitive data tasks like entry and migration.
• Basic IT and System Administration: AI tools automating monitoring, patching, and maintenance.
• Market Research and Analysis Firms: AI providing real-time insights and predictive analysis.
• Content Creation and Editing Services: AI generating marketing content and creative assets.
• Financial Advisory and Portfolio Management: AI-advisors /Agents delivering personalized investment strategies.
• Recruitment and Talent Acquisition Agencies: AI screening resumes and conducting initial interviews.
• Legal Document Review and Contract Management: AI automating legal research and compliance checks.
• Sales and Telemarketing Firms: AI-driven virtual assistants handling outreach and customer engagement.
• Education and Training Services: AI tutors and adaptive platforms personalizing learning experiences.

1.2 Other Top of mind concerns for CxOs in 2025.

• Scaling AI for All Business Sizes: Making AI accessible and affordable for mid-market and small businesses, ensuring they can compete in a world where AI is increasingly essential to remain agile and competitive.
• Skill Gap and Workforce Transformation: Addressing the widening skills gap by upskilling and re-skilling workers to adapt to AI-powered tools, while redefining roles and fostering a culture of innovation.
• Integration Across Ecosystems: Seamlessly integrating AI solutions into existing business systems and workflows while ensuring interoperability across platforms to maximize value and efficiency.
• Ethical AI and Responsible Deployment: Ensuring fairness, transparency, and inclusivity in AI systems to avoid biases and discrimination while fostering trust among users and stakeholders.

2. Who will disrupt these industries?

It's the Hyper-scalars competing to innovate & racing towards AGI

To sum up the tech trends in 2025 in one line, its the acceleration towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). In other words, technology singularity. That's the north star. Everything that's being done will eventually culminate into this one phenomena. However, AGI is not a point in time event though, it will rather be a period of time where AI would mature to transcend human capabilities at large and start unveiling inventions at Nobel prize laureate quality on almost daily basis.

2.1 Every tech company that exists today could fall into one of below 3 categories

• Category 1: Companies (or individuals) accelerating towards AGI or aiding in the process of getting to AGI: Trillion parameter LLMs, Multi-turn Agents, Multi-Modal / Multi-Agentic actions are all minor milestones in this journey. OpenAI has openly stated vision is to get to AGI, however, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, Meta are fast innovating in this space that can lead to similar outcomes.
• Category 2:  Companies (or individuals) building guardrails to make AGI safe (and interim milestones): Most above hyper-scalars are building Responsible AI platforms & frameworks in parallel with distinct models learning to prevent jailbreaks, prompt injections, model drifts, generate bias & discrimination and more. In addition, there’s huge inflow of startups that are working on this space to enable organizations safeguard their AI deployment fleet
• Category 3: Companies (or individuals) that leverage above 2 to unlock business value to their customers - Companies that are custodians of systems of record such as ITSM, Contract Management, CRM, Customer support etc - Companies that build software, deploy and build services and support around it. These companies are now experimenting with LLMs, Agents and looking to create value internally in the company & externally to their customers like listed in section 1.1.

3. How you & I can play major role in this game

1. Whether you are representing a company or individual, choose where your passion belongs in the above 3 areas. Ensure your skills follow the passion quickly and be able to make contributions & create value.
2. Know the distinction among these 3 key pillars and know your focussed specialization, that helps stay focussed in this ever changing landscape of AI business.
3. If you are a Data scientist, AI Engineer or developer with AI orientation at the core, theme 1 could be your thing. You will build the core of what the future of AI will look like or surrounding systems.
4. If you are an AI engineer with fundamentals rooted in the core platform, ethics, security, safety, privacy - then theme 2 could interest you - this needs equal or more skill & efforts to catch up with everything that can go wrong and proactively detect, put in guardrails to prevent.
5. Everyone else eventually falls onto theme 3. Theme 3 is an amazing opportunity to transform self & the markets just like how computerization or mobiles did, but at a totally different scale & magnitude.

As they say, applied knowledge is power - businesses can unlock new growth opportunities & individuals can leverage AI to boost productivity, creativity, and become the most desirable in business landscape...

Last mile hyper-personalisation & industry focus is the solution:

Last mile hyper-personalisation & industry focus: While complex agentic frameworks powered by most mature LLMs could attempt to provide a wide variety of industry solutions but only up to 80%. The remaining 20% of the solution includes hyper personalization, involves customer’s unique needs, domain’s unique opportunities and most importantly, customer data & feedback. These companies are sort of custodians of systems of record for ITSM, CRM, Customer Service & so on. In future, these companies don’t need to build software ground up or have thousands of human agents to manage, however, they can provide compelling business value and ROI to its customers with last mile personalization which is like a key to a complex puzzle. These companies hold that key. As much as the hyper-scalars would want to solve everyone’s problem, that will only distract them from

Finally, here are my thoughts on the comments by Satya Nadella & Sam Altman indicating LLMs & Agents will replace the SaaS - In my researched opinion, LLMs & Agents can replace the application building aspect but not the application + data + domain context. They give the means & tools to build applications, much faster, better, however, they themselves won't build those apps. The data & context are indispensable and give the edge to the companies that have them. You might wonder, what stops companies like Microsoft, Meta from building and deploying domain specific apps - Its a valid question, but in my opinion, there are so many domains to go after, and it just distracts these company's from building AGI. These Hyperscalars always look to build platforms to build apps & not apps themselves. This leaves huge niche space for organizations to still build SaaS and offer value based outcomes. So there's hope & a lot of success potential ahead... Let me know what you think and how you are planning 2025.