by Marc Warner
1. AI becomes essential, not experimental
The next wave of AI (artificial intelligence) adoption will require a shift in perspective from senior leaders to stop viewing AI as experimental and to start treating it as essential to business transformation. The novelty of experimenting with tools like meeting summaries should not distract from much bigger gains that AI can offer in 2025 and beyond.
AI needs to be involved at the level of core business processes to achieve its full value. As a rule of thumb, AI use cases should be mapped to top level key performance indicators to have a meaningful impact.
2. Executivess finally realise there’s no such thing as complete data
Today’s businesses are inundated with data, and the solution to making better, faster solutions is not adding more data to sort through. Instead of pursuing ‘complete’ data to make decisions, businesses need to identify the problems they want to solve and use that to help them find the right data.
Rather than trying to build perfect data infrastructure across the organisation, businesses will benefit most from adopting a decision-centric approach. One that separates data noise from signal by focusing on the specific problems the organisation needs to solve.
3. Business strategy will trump AI strategy
In 2025, the businesses that are most successful will integrate AI as a solution to their existing goals, rather than introducing standalone AI strategies. Introducing new goals driven solely by AI has the potential to over-complicate business processes and distract from solving key challenges.
Some businesses may rush to use AI as widely as possible but the number of AI use cases at play is not a measure of successful implementation. There must be a clear link to top level business priorities as a guiding principle to identify valuable use cases.
4. Big AI transformations will start incrementally
There are two major pitfalls for businesses to avoid when implementing AI – being unambitious and being over-ambitious. Limited AI programmes with one or two isolated use cases will not produce a sea change in the overall performance of a business. On the other hand, trying to overhaul entire business operations all at once is unlikely to deliver as planned.
The biggest AI breakthroughs in 2025 will come from incremental changes. This means implementing AI in small, targeted ways that deliver immediate value individually and drive large-scale transformation over time.
5. Humans are augmented, admin is automated
AI will impact jobs in 2025 but the way it affects them will depend on how the technology is deployed. Organisations can implement AI in a way that supports workers through a combination of automation and augmentation.
Regarding automation, AI’s strengths are ideally suited to tackling repetitive admin work. This will be a welcome transformation for many employees who feel that admin distracts from the core of their job. The role of augmentation will be to support decision making. Human judgement will remain in the driving seat but AI can play a complementary role in enhancing the speed, quality and execution of the decisions being made.
Dr Marc Warner is chief executive of Faculty which helps organisations make better decisions using human-led AI
www.faculty.ai
