Autonomous “agents” and profit are likely to dominate the artificial intelligence agenda next year, business executives and researchers predicted in interviews at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York this week.
Agents, or systems that can perform tasks on behalf of humans without their direct involvement, such as making purchases and scheduling meetings, have long been an elusive goal for AI researchers.
However, such capabilities were likely to be enabled this year by the emergence of step-by-step logic approaches used in OpenAI’s O1 model, executives told Reuters.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of momentum around agents next year, and I think people are going to be surprised at how quickly this technology comes to us,” said OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar.
“We think this is the beginning of what 2025 will be about: agents who are really there to help with everyday tasks,” she said.
Freire, who joined Microsoft-backed OpenAI six months ago, also predicted that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a threshold where autonomous systems surpass humans in economically valuable tasks — is likely to be achieved in the next few years.
Asked if that would be closer to two years or a decade, he predicted it would be “in the short term.”
“I can’t believe it’s a decade away,” Friar said.
George Matthews, managing director of venture capital firm Insight Partners, said the reasoning ability discovered last year is starting to pay dividends.
“We’re starting to see a complete reimagining of the entire back-office functions, as well as the front office functions,” Mathew said.
He cited as an example that he invested in a company called Relevance AI, which offers digital sales teams that can replace human workers at a quarter of the labor cost.
Given those kinds of productivity gains, another venture capitalist, Northzone’s Molly Alter, predicts that 2025 will be a “profit year for AI.”
“Last year it was more focused on revenue growth,” Alter said. “This year, it’s going to be, instead of growing, growing, growing, it’s going to be, ‘Wow, if I use AI, my margins are going to grow.’
Outside the world of tech startups, executives at major banks and other businesses say they’ve gone beyond use and integrated the technology into their workflows.
Thousands of employees at Bank BNY are now empowered to build LLM-fueled agents and help them with their day-to-day operations, CEO Robin Vince said. LLM refers to large language models, a type of AI.
“We’re investing and we have tools that drive more leverage for our people, that create solutions for customers, and insights and data for customers that would otherwise be nearly impossible to get through traditional means,” Vince said.
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