We’re just weeks away from a new year, and Silicon Valley’s obsession with artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. Yes, the biggest trend of 2024 will continue to dominate 2025. But new wrinkles will also appear over the next 12 months.
Companies will begin releasing more powerful AI models, while AI agents will gain importance. The industry will also work to bring AI capabilities to more consumers and work to make AI data centers more energy efficient.
According to Ashley Llorens, vice president and general manager of Microsoft (MSFT) Research, AI models will soon be able to handle much more complex tasks.
“What we have now is we have AI that can reason better, that can perceive the environment in a more sophisticated way,” Llorens told Yahoo Finance. “And so, that means we will be able to delegate a more sophisticated set of tasks to AI to complete on our behalf.”
This is where AI agents come into play. Think of agents as standalone or semi-autonomous applications that can perform specific tasks for you. They are more capable than traditional chatbots like ChatGPT that you are probably used to, but can still be controlled via natural language input.
For example, you can tell an AI agent how to sort incoming customer requests or extract information from invoices and drop it into the appropriate spreadsheet to more easily track employee expenses without having to do it all yourself.
Llorens said Microsoft uses AI agents to connect employees within its organization.
“We have this capability that we call ‘coffee connections.’ And it’s basically the idea that I delegate half an hour of my calendar every week to an AI system that tells me who I should have coffee with, anywhere in the organization,” explained Llorens .
“We have a background process where the AI basically simulates lots of random conversations between people, analyzes the result to see which conversations are the most interesting… and then uses that to suggest… ‘there you go, talk to this person , and by the way. , you may want to address these topics.’
AI will also become increasingly multimodal over the next year, helping it interact with textual, visual and audio input. Microsoft says you’ll start to see this when it launches its Copilot Vision for Copilot on Windows. The feature, which will be opt-in, will be able to see what you are looking at on a web page and then allow you to ask questions about it.
So if you’re watching a movie, you may be able to ask Copilot Vision who’s in it using your voice or text without naming the movie, and the app will know you’re talking about the movie poster or page Web you have. I look and give the appropriate response.