Gartner: 2025 Will See the Rise of AI agents

And other top trends for the coming new year from Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2024

Oct 22, 2024

The pace of AI continues to accelerate, with capabilities never before thought possible now becoming a reality. This is particularly true of AI agents, or virtual co-workers, which will work alongside us and, eventually, autonomously.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI (up from 0% in 2024). Further emphasizing the technology’s potential, the firm has named it a top strategic technology trend in 2025.

“It’s happening really, really fast,” Gene Alvarez, distinguished VP analyst with Gartner, told VentureBeat. “Nobody ever goes to bed at night with everything done. Organizations spend a lot of time monitoring things. The ability to create agents to not only do that monitoring but take action will help not just from a productivity perspective but a timing perspective.” What else does Gartner predict in AI for the coming year?

Continue to discover trends Gartner will explore at its IT Symposium/Xpo 2024.

Satya Nadella | Microsoft AI Tour: London

Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro share new news around Copilot and agents, showcasing how agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. In this keynote, Microsoft announces new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization.

First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month. Second, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance, and supply chain team.

One Zero, the AI Fintech Started by the Founder of MobileEye, is Raising $100M

Amnon Shashua, the founder and CEO of Mobileye, has an eye for complicated problems that he believes can be solved with AI, and that AI itself can be fixed to become more reliable. On the sidelines of building and running his self-driving car technology company — which he took public, then sold to Intel, then spun out again — he’s been hatching a number of other ideas.

Now, one of these is raising money and gaining significant momentum. One Zero, a fintech aiming to use AI in retail banking services, is in the process of raising at least $100 million, TechCrunch has learned. Despite being co-founded by one of the most high-profile and successful founders in Israel, One Zero has had surprisingly little attention to date outside of its home market.

But the company has raised around $242 million so far, and in 2023 it was valued at $320 million, per data in PitchBook. Our sources say that the valuation will be significantly higher in the next round. It is unclear who the investors are, but previous backers of the company include Tencent, OurCrowd, and SBI Ventures (the now-independent firm that once was a part of SoftBank).

Keep reading about One Zero’s $100 Million raise on TechCrunch

Tesla AI Turns Everyone Into a White Man

Since the early '90s Kathi Vidal has been immersed in AI, working as an engineer in its earliest stages – to innovate and more closely emulate nuances humans bring to problem solving.

Decades later, she leads a team across government to work on policy at the intersection of AI and innovation. At Fortune's Most Powerful Women conference in 2024, she discussed why women are essential to the development of AI and the policies that shape its implementation.

Microsoft Will Let Clients Build Their Own Artificial Intelligence Agents

Microsoft will allow its customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents from next month, in its latest push to tap the booming technology amid growing investor scrutiny of its hefty AI investments. The company is positioning autonomous agents—programs that need little human intervention unlike chatbots—as “apps for an AI-driven world” that can handle client queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.

Other big technology companies such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI. Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio—an application that requires little knowledge of computer code—to create such agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents.

The company is also introducing 10 ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications.

Larry Summers | AGI and the Next Industrial Revolution

Larry Summers is a former US Treasury Secretary (1999-2001), Chief Economist at the World Bank (1991-1993), and Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama (2009-2010). He also served as President of Harvard University (2001-2006). Currently, he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, and he sits on the board of directors at OpenAI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history.

Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Has Moved His AI Startup Out of Stealth

Parag Agrawal, a former CEO of Twitter, moved his AI startup out of stealth mode and clarified its name: Parallel Web Systems. It's unclear when Agrawal updated his LinkedIn profile with the startup's name, but he has been working on the venture since at least the start of 2024.

The Information reported in January, when the startup's name was still unknown, that Agrawal had raised about $30 million for the startup. Its backers include the venture-capital firms Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, and First Round Capital.

The company's LinkedIn page, which shows 10 other people working for it, links to a website that describes the startup as building "an API for AIs using web data." Parallel's website is short on details about its mission other than saying it's developing "systems for advanced AIs to work with the web."

It also predicts that AI will use the web on behalf of humans. "Access and computation on the web will increase by several orders of magnitude," the website says. "Everything from the infrastructure to business models will need to evolve."

We're Only at the Beginning of the AI Buildout, says Constellation's Ray Wang

Ray Wang, Constellation Research principal analyst, founder and chairman, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the state of the tech sector, impact of AI on the industry, his top Magnificent Seven pick, and more.

Gartner Analysts: “When AI Is Coming From Everywhere, Pace Yourself”

Not surprisingly, Gartner opened its annual Symposium/IT Expo on Monday by focusing on AI, in particular differentiating between companies that should look at themselves at "AI-steady" versus those that are "AI-accelerated" and develop different technology approaches as a result.

In a talk entitled "Pacing Yourself in the AI Races," Gartner analysts Hung LeHong and Mary Mesaglio discussed how it's easy to feel—in Gartner terms—that we're simultaneously at the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle for AI and at the trough.

That's because there are two different races going on. One is for tech vendors, where LeHong said new foundation models are being released every two and a half days. But on the other hand, nearly half of CIOs say AI hasn't met ROI expectations, and the race is on to deliver AI outcomes safely and at scale, where it's more important to set your own pace.

Mesaglio notes that for years, only about 20% of CEOs said AI would impact their industry, but this rose to 59% in 2023, and 74% in 2024. But both noted that it's the AI outcome race that really matters.

Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. Subscribe today, so you don’t miss any AI related news.