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Throughout 2024, agentic AI and AI agents emerged as key topics of discussion, gaining momentum as the year unfolded. Now, as we step into 2025, agentic AI is taking center stage, earning its place as the defining innovation of the year. Officially dubbed “The Third Wave of AI,” this technology will continue to develop and impact industries, reshaping the way we approach complex challenges.
What Is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI is a proactive type of artificial intelligence that’s capable of providing thoughtful answers and assisting with tasks. In its best form, it can be an extension of your team, and you can use them across industries such as sales, marketing and HR, among many others.
A few years ago, prior to launching my current company, I had an “aha” moment. I asked myself, “What if I had an AI workforce to handle all the tedious, mundane tasks in the business? How much more efficient would we be?” As we hit the top of 2025, other players, like Google, Nvdia and Salesforce, had their “aha” moments as well, driving them to launch their own agentic AI solutions, which we’re now starting to see come to market.
But where do we go from here? And what does the future of agentic look like with the AI market moving at such a rapid pace of innovation?
How AI, Agentic AI and AI Agents Will Impact the Workforce in 2025
These Industries Will Embrace Agentic AI Immediately
Off the bat, there are a few organizational functions that we predict are best primed to reap the benefits of agentic AI today: recruiting, sales, customer service, marketing and legal departments. Of course, you can apply this technology to any sector, but these roles are most able to embrace the technology and see the earliest impact given the amount of manual, process-driven work that underpins their functions, as well as the need to scale their teams to remain competitive.Â
Some Organizations Will Fall Behind in AI Adoption
This is a case of goldilocks: medium enterprise businesses have the resources to invest meaningfully in supporting this new technology and are ripe for the ability to scale. For smaller organizations and their enterprise counterparts, there are often different issues at play that may hold them back from early adoption.
They may lack the resources to fund and understand AI’s impact, while enterprises have more red tape to cut through in order to implement new technology. All organizations stand to gain from agentic AI, yet lack of education around the ease of use, productivity impacts and data privacy slows their pace.Â
The Benefits of Agentic AI-Enabled Automation Will Outweigh the Cons
Even though current headlines would have you believe that everyone has jumped on the agentic AI train, the reality is that AI in general still faces some fear. In fact, the first question ringing in the industry’s ear is “will it take my job?” Our point of view at Zeligate is that in the future, jobs will look different and sure, some roles will be phased out — but only to make room for the new roles that come with this level of innovation.Â
Let’s take HR and recruiting for example, as that’s the industry we live and breathe at my company. We do not believe agentic AI will take jobs, as human resources require human inputs. My wife Sam, an organizational psychologist with more than 20 years of experience in human resources, loves working with people but dislikes the admin and tedious tasks in HR.
Tasks such as creating job descriptions, reviewing resumes and setting up interviews are inefficient even in the best companies and so repetitive that it takes both the joy and “human” out of the role. This is where agentic AI shines: it takes the heavy lifting of manual inputs off HR and recruiting professional’s plates so they can focus more on high-value human interactions and outputs.
We’ll Establish an AI Hierarchy
While AI assistants are built to interact directly with humans, it’s also worth noting that organizations can deploy a network of specialized AI agents to operate behind the scenes. These agents can (and should) perform the heavy lifting around tasks such as data processing and analysis, report generation and visualization and continuous learning. This hierarchical AI structure allows for unparalleled scalability and efficiency in handling complex tasks and workflows.
We’ll Need New SDKs
As 2025 progresses, and more people welcome agentic AI, new software development kits will quickly become a priority. Legacy tech will not go away overnight, so SDKs will be one of the fastest ways to interact with other systems; agentic or not.
A few visionaries have jumped on board early and absolutely see the potential of agentic AI. Most companies, however, are still cautiously exploring today: aware of the intended value but unsure of how to measure the immediate impact and the downstream effects of AI on their workforce. I anticipate that throughout 2025, AI will become more normalized across many industries and will open up new opportunities that we have yet to even dream of.