Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, has big things in his mind for 2025. He advocated a bold vision for the current year and believes that artificial intelligence (AI) agents will become colleagues of the workforce. They will collaborate with the human employees and perform their repetitive tasks.
His prediction conveyed a vision that there are rapid advancements happening in the ecosystem of AI. Furthermore, there will be upcoming changes that will be visible in industries and employment environments.
At first, AI agents were seen as software programs that had the capacity to perform small tasks. But with time, those become future-ready and can perform high-end tasks, such as coding, data analysis, managing schedules and keeping a watch on customer interactions.
Altman emphasizes that these agents are on the cusp of being ready to "join the workforce," heralding a transformative era for business operations.
As per the news, OpenAI is working on Operator, an official AI Agent, that will be released in 2025. This AI agent has the capacity to handle several tasks independently. They can solve complex coding, schedule meetings, manage emails, make online purchases and many more.
Microsoft and Anthropic are following the same path in developing AI systems that require minimal human intervention.
AI-developing companies have a notion that the collaboration of AI with human employees will yield superb results.
As per official reports by the World Economic Forum (WEF), 50% of employers plan to reorient their business strategies in response to AI advancements. Additionally, two-thirds of employers are in favour of hiring candidates which hold AI skills, such as prompt engineering.
However, this shift proves to be negative for the employee world in the long run.
As a matter of fact, the WEF described a report where it revealed that 41% of companies will eliminate the workforce in the next five years.
There is a large debate between various industry experts with the introduction of AI into the workforce. Altman is optimistic about this new technology; however, some experts raised the caution alarm.
The experts against the motion revealed that AI is not ready to handle the tasks of humans and stressed that it will invite negative societal impacts.
Joanna Causon, Chief Executive of The Institute of Customer Service, remains positive about the integration of AI at workplaces to improve customer outcomes. However, she cautioned that these technologies can improve the services, but customers can feel alienated if they are not managed.
Many industries have started adopting AI technologies in their workflows. An official report was published by Deloitte, called Deloitte's 2025 Predictions Report, stated that 25% of enterprises using generative AI are forecast to deploy AI agents in 2025, with this figure expected to grow to 50% by 2027.
Another report by KPMG stated that 68% of business leaders are receiving stress from their investors to extract a return on investment from AI tools. This simply highlighted that companies should reduce hiring and ask their current employees to use AI systems.
Whether you remain positive or negative about AI, it is true that this technology will prosper more in future. The data provided by LinkedIn showed that 30% hiring that was performed in fall of 2024 was related to AI only.
Employers have one demand now that the current or future candidate should be proficient with AI knowledge.
Every year new advancements are announced by AI developing companies, such as Operator by OpenAI, Copilot by Microsoft, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental by Google, Agentic AI by Nvidia, Agentforce 2.0 by Salesforce and many more.
While luminaries in the field of AI, such as Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., favor the motion, there are other experts who want to caution the world about AI usage.
It depends on the companies' ability to use AI to increase their productivity and keep stakeholders satisfied.