The Agentic AI Explosion — And Agents' Arrival On Teams
The second half of 2024 witnessed the rise of agentic AI, especially through Salesforce's Agentforce and Microsoft's Copilot Agents solutions, but 2025 could see the AI agent space explode, especially around elevating the employee experience.
"Everybody will have an agent," Amanda Sterner, Technical Architect of Modern Work at Advania, said. "Agents were the hottest topic at Microsoft Ignite. It doesn't matter if you want to streamline your workflows or have someone to have real-time collaboration with, if you have a need, there will be an agent."
"Agentic AI will be the rage," Patrick Kelley, Distinguished Architect at Zoom, added. "Taking AI beyond just generating the content, that's so 2024!"
"Vendors will start unveiling AI that actually does mundane tasks for you. For example, you're in a chat channel with 10 people, and somebody says, 'We need a meeting to discuss all this stuff.' Instead of checking people's calendars to find a time and creating an agenda, an agentic AI bot will be able to summarise the chat topic, find an open slot for everyone, create the agenda, and send out the meeting, saving me countless minutes doing all this manually."
Sterner also believes that Copilot Agents will also be more formally integrated across Microsoft Teams as another boost to collaboration. "There will be Microsoft Teams agents or just a simple way of creating them for Teams to use on Teams, to use them for narrowing down the answers we're getting from AI, which would be a chef's kiss!" Sterner expanded.
Jon Arnold, Principal Analyst at J Arnold & Associates, also highlights the approach of agentic AI: "All the collaboration platforms are now basically moving towards having this capability where we each have our own personalised assistant that can handle tasks end-to-end without human intervention. It's like having a personal secretary to do all of your day-to-day workflow items automatically."
"This gives us more time to do our more human-centric tasks. I think you'll see it big time in the contact centre, for sure, this AI agent concept, but you're going to see more of it being central to the UC value proposition in 2025."
The RTO Debate Coming To A Head
The return-to-office (RTO) debate is more vocal than ever. Massive businesses like Amazon and Dell are mandating full-time returns to the office, while prominent surveys indicate that flexible working has overtaken pay as the most important issue for many workers. Could 2025 see even more dramatic twists in this subject?
"I want to go back to the concept of where we're going to work," said Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder at The Collab Collective. "I'm going to drop a number to really hammer home this idea. $1 trillion. That's the amount of debt coming due in commercial real estate in the US market in the next 12-24 months. That's about 20 percent of commercial real estate debt being refreshed at this point in time."
What does this mean?
"To me, that means hybrid work, distributed work, modern work, whatever words you want to use is not going away," Durr expanded. "Now, here's the interesting twist that's going with that. A lot of that debt is going to be hitting the small-to-midsize banking industry, and they typically serve small to midsize enterprises."
"In the past year, we've heard a lot about how enterprises are driving the idea of commercial real estate and what's coming back into the office or not. Amazon is making mandates, and other people are changing their tune. I think this is really going to hit home in the small to midsize enterprise in the next 20-24 months."
"We're currently sitting at 20-25 percent of companies working or having some remote work in the US, and I think that number is going to stay solid, and if not, potentially increase going into 2025."
How does Durr expect this to impact tech leaders?
"If you are an IT decision-maker within a small-to-midsize space, I expect that if you haven't already confronted the idea of how we're going to work and use our corporate real estate going forward, 2025 and 2026 are going to be your years," he said. "You're going to have a lot of pressure from your board about your real estate strategy, and you're going to have to start thinking about 'How are we going to implement hybrid or distributed work?'"
"It's not going to be anything new, but I think you'll see a lot of companies who haven't committed to that yet will have to confront it."
