5 AI Truths for 2025- A New Year list
Discover 5 essential truths about AI in 2025 that cut through the hype. Learn how AI at the core, digital workers, and automation drive real business impact, faster results, and lower costs.
By: Ken Parmelee & Dennis Ashby
With all the AI hype which continues to fracture into other forms and concepts like Generative and Agentic, it’s no wonder there is confusion on where there’s value. These 5 truths are meant to help cut through marketing and concept to help you understand what AI solutions can create real impact for your business.
1. For there to be real and fast value, AI must be at the core of a software product, operating it.
Many software companies have added AI rather than build it into the core of their products. This means that it is more for data analysis and insights or add-on functionality. This matters because the high value of uses of AI allows it to do work and with higher quality and reliability. You don’t have to be a data scientist to glean this point. Ask your software vendors for an architecture review that shows how the AI is implemented in the product. If it’s not at the core, it will not create high value and sustained business impact.
2. AI driven software will run from the cloud and focus on economy and reliability.
When products run on AI, they use it continuously. That means old models of paying for AI use and AI invocations spin costs out of control quickly. It’s not good enough to pay on use anymore. You must know that the software companies you work with are using methods to control and optimize their use of AI. Engineering AI to perform and be cost effective cannot be an afterthought or as soon as you begin to use it heavily, the costs will sink the value. Understand how the AI costs translate into licensing costs.
3. Personal productivity tools using generative prompts will not make the big impacts.
There’s no question that there’s value in faster and simpler content creation, but real value is created where AI can perform functions on its own. In earlier products, the capability, complexity and cost of AI hemmed software product developers in from being able to fully automate job functions. Today with careful analysis of work and techniques in leveraging many forms of AI together, digital workers can actually replace human work. Test the software product and see whether it lives up to the marketing.
4. Software companies that focus on automating work functions will win.
How can I say this so confidently? Legacy software will not be able to re-engineer and re-build their products quickly enough from human centered design to AI automated work. In their attempts to keep their customers, they will bolt-on AI capabilities. These will not provide the same value as AI centered software focused on digital workers doing the work. Companies that adopt the AI centered digital work software will gain a tremendous edge over those that don’t with lower operating costs, faster work completion and higher quality results. Businesses can’t afford to wait and see what will happen and need to drive business transformation with new AI at the core digital worker solutions. Focus on fast value.
5. Digital workers that are already trained to perform jobs expertly are your fastest path to value.
We all know a reality of how business works today. When you hire a person who has a lot of skill and motivation, you get outsized results from that worker. This new era of technology is the same and you should think of it in the same way. You are now hiring digital workers for a job function in the form of software. If the software is not already an expert in the area it is going to perform the work, it will take you years to train it to be as good as a human worker. Be dubious of software vendors and SIs that promote human-assistive software. This belies the reality that their product cannot perform a job function without people. No software vendor that was being truthful would tell you that you no longer need whole departments of workers. It is real, today, that companies can hit significant reductions in some job functions with expert digital workers performing the work. Look for software products that can do full work functions not just assistive capabilities to create significant business impact.
The last few years have driven tremendous technology change. Use the 5 AI Truths for 2025 to help you drive real value for your business for 2025!
