By 2025, AI will evolve from a tool for work and home to a core component of both. AI-powered agents will accomplish more with greater autonomy, simplifying life at home and at work. Globally, AI will help find new ways to address some of the biggest challenges we face, from the climate crisis to access to healthcare. These advances will come from advances in AI’s ability to remember and reason, among other innovations. Microsoft will remain committed to helping people use and implement AI that is trusted and secure.
“AI is already making the impossible possible, and over the past year we’ve seen a significant number of people and organizations move from experimentation to more meaningful adoption,” said Chris Young, executive vice president at Microsoft. “This is the beginning of a massive transformation in how this technology will change every aspect of our lives.”
In the last year alone, the use of generative AI has jumped from 55% to 75% among business leaders and AI decision makers. New AI tools will offer even greater potential.
Here are six AI trends to watch—and how Microsoft will innovate on each—in 2025.
1 – AI models will become more powerful and more useful
In 2024, models have become faster and more efficient. Today, large-scale, state-of-the-art models can perform a wide range of tasks, from writing to coding, while highly specialized models can be tailored to specific tasks or industries.
In 2025, they will do more, and even better.
Models with advanced reasoning capabilities, like OpenAI o1, can already solve complex problems by following logical steps that are similar to how humans think before answering difficult questions. These capabilities will continue to be useful in fields such as science, coding, mathematics, law, and medicine, allowing models to compare contracts, generate code, and execute multi-step workflows.
These advances will be important for model innovation, but so will data curation and post-training. For example, Microsoft’s Phi family of small models has shown that curating high-quality data can improve model performance and reasoning.
Microsoft’s Orca and Orca 2 models also demonstrated the power of synthetic data for post-training small language models, enabling them to achieve unprecedented levels of performance.
Accelerating, improving and specializing models will enable new and more useful AI experiences, including with agents in 2025.
According to Ece Kamar, general manager of Microsoft’s AI Frontiers Lab: “There could be a synergy between how we train models and how those models feed back to agents. Users will have more flexibility than ever to choose or build models that meet their needs.”
2 – Agents will change daily work habits
At nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies, workers already use Microsoft 365 Copilot to perform many repetitive, mundane tasks, such as sorting through emails and taking notes in Teams meetings. By 2025, a new generation of AI-powered agents will do more—even taking care of some tasks on your behalf.
“Think of agents as the applications of the AI era,” said Charles Lamanna, vice president of business and industry at Copilot. “Just as we use different applications for different tasks, agents will begin to transform every business process, revolutionizing the way we work and run our organizations.”
With advances in memory, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities, agents will accomplish more complex missions with new skills and ways of interacting.
Businesses can reimagine processes like reporting and HR tasks. For example, helping with an IT issue or answering benefits questions frees up employees to focus on higher-value tasks. Businesses can deploy multiple agents to alert supply chain managers of stockouts, recommend new suppliers, and fulfill orders, addressing daily challenges to help maintain revenue.
You can create and use agents regardless of your technical skills. Anyone can create an agent in Copilot Studio—no coding required—while developers can create more sophisticated agents to orchestrate more complex tasks in Azure AI Foundry .
All of this will lay the foundation for a future where organizations will have a constellation of agents—from simple invite and response to full autonomy—working independently or together on behalf of individuals, groups, or functions to execute and orchestrate processes.
Amid all this AI development, human supervision will remain a central cog in the evolving wheel of AI-powered agents. In 2025, much of the discussion will be about defining the boundaries of what agents are and are not allowed to do, and whether there is a need for ongoing human supervision.
3 – AI assistants will accompany you in your daily life
Outside of work, AI will make some aspects of your life easier in 2025. In fact, Microsoft Copilot can accompany you throughout the day in the form of an AI companion .
It will help you simplify and prioritize your daily flow of information to free up your time, while protecting your privacy, data and security.
Over the coming year, Copilot will evolve to help you stay more connected and will be packed with new features.
Copilot Daily, for example, will start your day by reading you a summary of the news and weather in a familiar voice.
When you choose to use Copilot Vision, it will be able to see what you are viewing online and discuss it with you because it will understand the web page. It will be able to answer your questions and suggest possible next steps.
Copilot will also help you make decisions. For example, it can help you furnish your new apartment by looking for matching furniture, then think about the best way to arrange it to respect the principles of Feng Shui.
And that’s just the beginning. In the coming years, AI experiences will become increasingly precise and emotionally intelligent, leading to ever more fluid interactions.
4 – Over time, AI will become more resource efficient
While AI requires resources such as energy, innovative solutions are available to address this challenge. For example, while data center workloads were nine times greater in 2020 than in 2010, their electricity demand only increased by 10% .
Part of the reason for this is that Microsoft, either alone or in collaboration with other players such as AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, is working to make its hardware more efficient. Whether it’s its custom silicon series, Azure Maia and Cobalt, or its liquid-cooled heat exchanger unit designed to efficiently cool large-scale AI systems.
In the coming years, new data centers that support AI will come online and will not require water for cooling. In addition, Microsoft plans to expand the use of super-efficient liquid cooling systems, such as cold plates .
It’s all part of a broader effort to make the infrastructure that powers AI more efficient and sustainable by 2025.
While helping to build a more efficient AI infrastructure, Microsoft will continue to invest in and increase the use of low-carbon manufacturing materials, such as near-zero carbon steel, concrete alternatives, and cross-laminated timber.
The company will also continue to invest in and utilize carbon-free sources, such as wind, geothermal, nuclear and solar. The company is making long-term investments to bring more carbon-free electricity to the grids where it operates and continues to advocate for the expansion of clean energy solutions around the world.
Mark Russinovich, CTO, Deputy CISO and CTO of Azure, said : “This is just one part of the infrastructure Microsoft is planning to achieve its goal of being a carbon-negative, water-positive, and zero-waste company by 2030. In 2025 and beyond, we will take a holistic view of data centers, energy, and resources to maximize the efficiency of our entire infrastructure.”
5 – Measurement and personalization will be the keys to responsible AI development
AI measurement is about defining and assessing AI risks. It is essential to building AI responsibly and can be summed up in two words: testing and personalization.
If you can measure risks and threats, you can help address or mitigate them. This means, for example, detecting and addressing unfounded content, known as “hallucinations,” which are inaccurate responses from AI.
Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s product manager for responsible AI, says part of Microsoft’s ongoing work to build reliable AI applications is developing rigorous and comprehensive tests. In addition to assessing internal threats like hallucinations, the tests will become better at recognizing increasingly sophisticated external attacks.
“Even as the models become more secure, we need to bring the tests and measurements up to par with the worst threats we see – tests that represent a sophisticated adversary and what they’re capable of doing. We have the foundation, and we’re going to continue to build on it moving forward.”
Users will also have greater control over how AI applications work within their organization. They will be able to customize the applications that filter content and set safeguards that are tailored to their work. A video game company, for example, will be able to specify what types of violent content employees who design games have access to.
“The admin can change the control of Microsoft 365 Copilot to indicate what types of content are appropriate in a workplace so people can do their jobs. The future is in control and personalization.”
6 – AI will accelerate scientific advances
AI is already having a profound impact around the world, driving advances in everything from supercomputers to weather forecasting. It is fueling historic breakthroughs in scientific research and promises to unlock new capabilities in the natural sciences, sustainable materials, drug discovery, and human health.
In 2024, Microsoft Research made a major breakthrough that will enable researchers to explore some of the most challenging problems in biomolecular science, including the discovery of new life-saving drugs, with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Using an AI-driven protein simulation system, they found a new way to simulate biomolecular dynamics . This method, called AI2BMD, could help scientists solve previously intractable problems and boost biomedical research in the areas of protein design, enzyme engineering, and drug discovery.
The impact of AI on science will continue to grow.
According to Ashley Llorens, corporate vice president and general manager of Microsoft Research, one of the most interesting things to watch in 2025 will be the impact of using AI in scientific research to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
“We will begin to see a measurable impact of these tools on the performance of people and institutions working on these big problems, such as designing sustainable materials and accelerating the development of life-saving drugs. ”
One thing is certain, in 2025, AI will continue to drive innovation and unlock new potential for individuals and organizations around the world.
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