In 2025, you'll have to get ready for "knowledge," AI governance will move to the forefront, enterprise software models will be revamped, decision automation will depend on humans in the loop and data strategies will be a pain point.
At Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise conference in Half Moon Bay, the first panel revolved around the first cut of 2025 predictions.
Here's the recap.
Martin Schneider:
- Growth strategies and customer journeys will evolve into orchestrated engagements designed for an entire lifecycle.
- Revenue plans will be modeled from the ground up by AI.
- AI-generated workflows will bring new approaches to customer data that will drive repeatable and scalable predictions.
Chirag Mehta:
- Cybersecurity implementations will move toward focusing more on response than prevention.
- Generative AI will change the way software is built to make it more secure.
- Chief product officers will have all the tools needed to exploit product development for growth. CPOs will no longer be chief backlog officers.
Me:
- The enterprise software model will change and alter the way CIOs buy applications. The problem is that revenue models are in flux. Value based models, consumption models and traditional seat models will all be under fire.
- Agentic AI orchestration and processes will be critical and a main focus for enterprises in the year ahead.
Andy Thurai:
- AI projects will get real budgets and be under more scrutiny for returns on use cases.
- AI governance will be critical as enterprises grow concerned about synthetic data.
- Here's the problem: AI produces AI that is monitored by AI (see the conflict of interest here?).
- 2025 will bring more data, more uses cases and more issues. The lawyers will be busy.
Doug Henschen:
- Enterprises will realize that they have real data problems to solve before implementing genAI.
- "Seventy percent of enterprises in our AI survey aren't seeing the ROI. What these companies have in common is a lack of data, not enough scale and not enough cleanliness," said Henschen.
- There will be a barrage of vendor announcements looking to solve these data issues to make data usable for AI.
Liz Miller:
- 2025 will be the year where enterprises are actually doing what they should be with AI. That means guardrails and a focus on processes. "What we've learned about genAI is that when you automate a really old process with AI you really get a really old result," said Miller.
- Enterprise buyers will hear a lot about "knowledge" in 2025, but CxOs shouldn't treat the topic as just another buzzword. Knowledge is about all the accumulated data across the enterprise that drives experiences.
Holger Mueller:
- Human capital management will see significant changes. On the people front, employees and gig workers can be doing the same thing. Payroll will become a key sector for innovation. And applications will become more intuitive.
- AI will become turbocharged by transactional data.
- 2025 will be the year of quantum computing (again).
Ray Wang:
- Automation is transforming markets and the field will revolve around decisions, not more AI.
- "We're going to move the conversation out of AI into agents that can make decisions," said Wang.
- Budgets will focus on exponential efficiency due to cost pressures.
- Automation success will depend on where you put humans in the process loop. "The number one question for automation is where do you insert the humans," said Wang.
- Automation will become less of a concern due to demographics. Most countries won't have enough working people to do the work so automation is necessary.
