Artificial intelligence consistently gets placed at the top in the trend forecasts regarding technologies enabling the next stages of digital transformation and a more data- and AI-driven Industry 4.0 (or 5.0) model. But what are the key 2025 AI trends?
Now that generative AI is past the “peak of inflated expectations,” and agentic AI is the buzzword of the day, we take a look at the key AI trends 2025 according to Gartner with a brief look at the importance and place of a human-first AI approach.
At the end of 2024, VP Analyst Gene Alvarez presented the 10 top strategic technology trends companies should explore in 2025 at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo. The trends were divided into three categories; artificial intelligence was one of them.
At the very top of the artificial intelligence category or, more precisely, in “AI imperatives and risks,” we find agentic AI, followed by AI governance platforms and disinformation security. Agentic AI also topped the list of all strategic technology trends, regardless of category.
A few months later, in early 2025, Gartner presented the key AI trends for the enterprise in 2025. Agentic AI also topped the list of AI trends. VP Analyst Pieter J. den Hamer mentioned the six key AI trends for organizations, including agentic AI, per Gartner, and took a closer look at some of them in a 1-hour webinar.
Six trends and three themes for successful human-first AI adoption
In addition to AI agents, Pieter mentioned human-first AI (a bit more on that later), AI for decision intelligence, causal and embodied AI, composite and neurosymbolic AI, and AI guardrails. We briefly look at some of the most important takeaways, mainly from a human-first AI perspective, without detailing every trend in Gartner’s AI 2025 trend overview.
Note that the six AI 2025 trends were divided into three interrelated and interacting themes. And these were not chosen at random. They represent three key aspects and priorities for the successful adoption of AI by the enterprise. The three themes are:
- How organizations can create more value with AI and AI can have a positive impact. In this theme, we see trends such as decision intelligence and AI literacy (with the second also being important in the EU from a regulatory standpoint).
- Learning and understanding how AI can become more usable or ‘more actionable’ and thus more broadly and effectively deployable. This is where AI agents and agentic AI come into strong focus, and we also find causal AI.
- The third and final theme is promoting more trustworthy AI. This category includes trends such as AI guardrails and neurosymbolic AI.
Den Hamer began with a look at Gartner’s AI Hype Cycle. There are definitely a lot of trends and technological evolutions in the rapidly evolving AI landscape, making the Hype Cycle look pretty crowded. And we’re only at the beginning, according to Pieter.
The AI hype cycle shows that GenAI is already past the peak of inflated expectations. And that means people are also starting to see the limitations.
On the other hand, some of the “newer” trends coming our way are related to generative AI, and quite a few also aim to improve certain aspects of GenAI or, at least, will do so to realize their potential. One area to improve is GenAI’s reliability, for example. Other AI trends in the 2025 top are related to various forms of AI (including GenAI) and/or prepare the way for the next AI wave. Here, agentic AI inevitably comes to mind.
Realizing the promise of AI with human-first AI
While all kinds of AI evolutions might help to improve what we have and do today, they need to be about more than technology and tools. Creating real value with AI has been and continues to be difficult for many companies. One can only imagine that new AI trends will also come with new challenges.
That’s why there is quite some focus on human-first AI, which is the first AI 2025 trend per Gartner, and it is a crucial way to realize the value of AI while making it ‘easier’ to do so.
Simply put, human-first AI is an approach to AI that recognizes that there is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence. Many new roles are also emerging to implement, train, monitor, and, overall, leverage AI. In time, AI will play an increasing role in several of these human tasks. That will probably be even the case – to some extent – in monitoring and overview.
Moreover, people continue to create the content – in the broadest sense – used to train AI and get from content and data to knowledge, action, augmentation and agency (sounds a bit like the AI version of DIKW). This human content creation role might change to an extent as well, but per Pieter den Hamer, over time, this will degrade the performance of AI. In a nutshell, people – or humans – remain crucial to engineering and governing AI, among others.
Why AI literacy matters in human-first AI
And it’s not just about people in new roles. A second crucial human aspect in realizing the value of AI concerns another AI 2025 top trend per Gartner, AI literacy (which, as mentioned, also has a regulatory side with the EU AI Act).
Again, it is pretty simple: in general, it can be said that the more people have knowledge and skills related to AI, the higher the chance of a responsible and relevant use of AI in the organization. This literacy should certainly not be limited to the (technology) experts. Literacy is also about more than learning to understand about AI, what it can mean for the organization and one’s work, and the risks and downsides from various perspectives.
The latter means understanding often covered risks on levels such as accuracy and cybersecurity, to name a few, and the dangers of overestimating AI’s positive impact in specific areas. AI isn’t magical, and it’s certainly not useful for everything people sometimes believe it is.
Still, AI literacy’s primary goal is to get a proper understanding adapted to the role of the people getting trained.
Giving AI agency – how humans and AI work together
That brings us to the question of how AI and humans should be able to work together and often reinforce each other, another topic in the broader human-first AI approach.
Here, den Hamer emphasizes it’s a spectrum where, at one end, we give AI autonomy and agency to do a lot on its own, and at the other end, we let people do most of the work. The use case and characteristics of the tasks to be completed (complexity of the task, time to complete it, risk content, etc) are key here, as are the roles and skills of people.
And, for sure, the degree of human work and autonomy for the AI depends a lot on the context within which something is done or an organization operates. Regulations and the critical nature of data and processes will have an impact here, and you’ll see comparable processes being done entirely differently depending on the organization.
That’s it for a summary of some aspects of human-first AI as an AI 2025 top trend, as Pieter covered them. As said earlier, there are five more AI trends in the on-demand webinar with top AI trends 2025 for the enterprise, so do check them out – and stay tuned.
Top image purchased under license Adobe Stock, all other images belong to their respective mentioned owners and serve illustration purposes.
