Hello, this is Dion Hinchcliffe. I’m VP of the CIO practice at Futurumgroup.com and here are my analyst predictions for 2025. I’ve got three of them. We’re now moving into a new domain called agent-based AI and this is the next big wave in generative AI. And instead of generating content for you, it’s this AI that takes direct action on your behalf. So actually, getting work done and using a browser or using applications and actually accomplishing tasks autonomously across multiple applications and it can be multi-step tasks and it can be for a long period of time.
And so, this has implications for the digital labor market very significantly. A large percentage, and by our estimates about 4 trillion globally in labor, can be automated in this fashion. So, a lot of rote tasks that before might have had AI advising you or are telling you how to best complete that task using content. Now the AI can just go actually do it for you. That has major significance in terms of how CIOs are going to automate in the future. We’ve been following all the latest agentic AI product announcements from the top enterprise vendors. We have a report coming out in a few weeks that will cover them. But what organizations have to be doing is getting experience now and making Agentic AI perform and do it safely with guardrails.
My next prediction is also about AI. Something called super intelligence. Then the next step beyond that we may reach, which is artificial general intelligence. And this is a conversation I don’t see enough people focusing on because it has major strategic impact to our organizations. And this is the top vendors like OpenAI or Anthropic who have the stated goal of eventually getting to the most advanced type of AI. That’s the AGI I just mentioned. But on the way, and we’re seeing signs that we’re actually starting to reach it, is this concept of super intelligence, which is AI that is smarter than our best PhDs, smarter than our best geniuses who can do things. They can solve problems that humans cannot and have not been able to solve so far.
And we’re seeing, as the AI models climb the IQ benchmarks, you know run every day and all the new models that are being released – new versions of models that are being released all the time – we’re seeing that they’re closing in on that super intelligence which should be in the lab by the end of the year. And it’s something organizations have to be contending with, preparing for, because super intelligence can allow your organization to do things your competitors can’t. It’s very significant and this milestone will be reached here shortly. And it’ll be in production and available to all enterprises sometime next year. So definitely have to prepare for that.
And my last prediction has to do with the cloud. Modernizing existing workloads and moving new workloads out to the public cloud. And that now is because of the cost of these new types of workloads. AI workloads are always on. We also have a lot more compliance and regulatory issues, data residency we have to deal with. And then so private cloud is returned to the conversation. Using the same technologies but running inside co-location or inside an enterprise data center to really manage costs or optimize performance or to deliver on constraints like data residency that can’t be delivered easily any other way. And so private cloud is not going to be the next new destination. Public cloud is still the primary destination.
But we see private cloud emerging as a major alternative for certain types of workloads. So, it’s always on to highly perform at those things like AI training. It has to be run for months. It often makes sense just to cut out the middleman and there’s significant cost savings in that regard. And so, we see private cloud is really being added to the mix to the whole spectrum of the cloud computing conversation. It’s part of a continuum, where before we only saw public cloud. So that’s a major shift. 71% of CIOs say they’re reconsidering where they’re going to run their workloads this year. So that shows you how big a trend. So, I predict organizations will be adding a lot more to the mix going forward.
And so those are my analyst predictions, really focused on the CIO for 2025. You can catch all the Futurum Group Analyst Predictions in our eBook which you can find at Futurumgroup.com.
