We’re just weeks away from the new year, but Silicon Valley’s obsession with artificial intelligence isn’t stopping. Yes, the biggest trends of 2024 will continue to dominate in 2025. But there will also be some new wrinkles over the next 12 months.
Companies will begin to release more powerful AI models, and the presence of AI agents will increase. The industry will also focus on bringing AI capabilities to more consumers and will work to improve the energy efficiency of AI data centers.
According to Ashley Llorens, corporate vice president and managing director at Microsoft (MSFT) Research, AI models will soon be able to handle more complex tasks.
“What we have now is we have AI that can reason better and perceive the environment in a more sophisticated way,” Llorens told Yahoo Finance. . “What this means is that we will be able to delegate a more sophisticated set of tasks to AI to complete on our behalf.”
That’s where AI agents come into play. Think of agents as autonomous or semi-autonomous apps that can perform specific tasks. These are more capable than the traditional chatbots you’re probably familiar with, such as ChatGPT, but can still be controlled via natural language input.
For example, you can tell an AI agent how to prioritize incoming customer requests or pull information from an invoice and drop it into the appropriate spreadsheet to help your employees spend more without having to do it all themselves. Easy to track.
Llorens said Microsoft is using AI agents to connect employees across the organization.
“We have this feature we call ‘Coffee Connection,’ and it essentially means I can delegate 30 minutes of my calendar every week to an AI system to tell me who I should have a coffee chat with, anywhere in my organization. The idea is that it will teach you,” Llorens explained.
“We have a background process where the AI basically simulates a lot of random conversations between people and analyzes the results to see which conversations are the most interesting. “Now, talk to this person. By the way, you might want to refer to these topics.”
AI will also become increasingly multimodal over the next year, capable of manipulating text, visual, and audio input, and more. Microsoft says we’ll start seeing this when we release Copilot Vision for Copilot on Windows. This feature is opt-in and allows you to see what users are looking at on your web pages and ask questions about it.
So if you’re watching a movie, you might be able to use voice or text to ask Copilot Vision who’s in the movie without saying the name of the movie. That way the app knows you’re talking about a movie poster or a web page. Please reconfirm and take appropriate action.
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