The artificial intelligence (AI) fever in Silicon Valley has not cooled down yet, and 2025 promises to bring many breakthroughs.
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| Silicon Valley bets on artificial intelligence in 2025. (Source: Genk) |
More powerful AI models and especially the emergence of “AI agents” will be in the spotlight. The industry will also focus on making AI more accessible to users and saving energy in data centers.
According to Ashley Llorens, Vice President and General Manager at Microsoft Research, AI will soon be able to handle more complex tasks. "AI is now capable of better reasoning and has more sophisticated environmental awareness, which means we can delegate more complex tasks to AI," Llorens said.
And that’s where AI “agents” come in. AI agents are virtual assistants that can mobilize different data sources to perform extensive and autonomous tasks with the help of generative artificial intelligence. Think of AI “agents” as automated or semi-automated applications that perform specific tasks on demand, going beyond conventional chatbots like ChatGPT. For example, you can assign an AI “agent” to categorize a customer request or pull information from an invoice and put it into the appropriate spreadsheet.
“AI agents go beyond simple chatbots, which are limited to question-and-answer exchanges. They are designed to break down problems into specific tasks and solve each part autonomously,” explains Nicolas de Bellefonds, global head of AI at BCG. Some AI agents are even capable of reasoning in the language of the business. The long-term idea is to have different agents coexist and collaborate to support workers in useful and effective ways, if not replace them in some functions.
Microsoft is using AI “agents” to connect internal employees. The “coffee connect” feature will automatically suggest interesting conversations between employees based on a background process where the AI simulates a lot of random conversations between people, analyzes the results to see which conversations are the most interesting, and then uses that to make recommendations.
AI in the coming year is expected to become multimodal, able to interact with text, images, and audio. Copilot Vision in Windows is an example. So if you're watching a movie, you can ask Copilot Vision who the actors are by voice or text without naming the movie, and the app will know you're talking about the movie poster or the website you're viewing and provide an appropriate response.
In addition to the increased functionality, Microsoft says AI will become more energy efficient through hardware upgrades. The company says that in the coming years, new data centers will “use zero water for cooling,” and it will focus on using less carbon-intensive steel and concrete instead. Amazon, Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the cloud computing space, has also announced efforts to improve the efficiency of its data centers.
Microsoft, which has invested heavily in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is among a host of companies betting on AI for growth. Amazon has invested in AI company Anthropic, while Google, which has also invested in Anthropic, is continuing to build out its Gemini AI product line.
Facebook’s parent company Meta is also focusing on AI to help with ad sales and customer retention functions, while Wall Street is looking for evidence that Silicon Valley’s massive AI investments are paying off in revenue and stock prices.
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