Agentic AI Named Top Tech Trend for 2025 – Campus Technology

Agentic AI named top tech trend for 2025

Agentic AI will be the most important technology trend for 2025, according to research firm Gartner. The term describes autonomous machine “agents” that go beyond generative query-and-response chatbots and complete business-related tasks without human guidance.

Of course, the idea of ​​AI agents completing their tasks independently raises fears of HAL 9000 and Terminator, just to name two movie examples, and Gartner highlighted the challenges in this area, pointing out that autonomous AI provides “robust guardrails requires to ensure compliance with providers’ requirements and users’ intentions, which could potentially include not destroying humanity.

Some of the more realistic challenges the company has listed elsewhere include:

• Agentic AI spreads without control or tracking;
• Agentic AI makes decisions that are not trustworthy;
• Agentic AI based on low-quality data;
• resistance from employees; And
• Agent AI-driven cyberattacks that enable “smart malware.”

Meanwhile, the business benefit is: “A virtual workforce of agents that support, relieve and augment the work of humans or traditional applications.”

The report tracks the moves of cloud giants Microsoft and Google in this area. It lists common enterprise use cases for agent AI:

• Self-driving cars: These vehicles navigate roads, make driving decisions and avoid obstacles without human intervention.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Autonomous software agents can handle routine business processes such as data entry or email responses.
• Virtual assistants: AI-driven personal assistants like Siri or Alexa execute commands, answer questions and interact with users autonomously.
• AI in video games: Non-playable characters (NPCs) who adapt to the player’s behavior, learning and changing their tactics over time.

In fact, Gartner predicts that within four years at least 15% of everyday work decisions will be made autonomously by agentic AI, up from virtually 0% this year.

These statistics are fleshed out in the company’s “What is Agentic AI” guide: “Today’s AI models perform tasks such as generating text, but these are ‘prompted’ – the AI ​​does not act on its own. This will address the agentic Change AI soon.” or AI with agency. By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will contain agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of daily work decisions to be made autonomously.”

Tom Coshow, Senior Director Analyst, said: “Organizations have long wanted to foster high-performing teams, improve cross-functional collaboration, and coordinate issues across team networks. Agentic AI has the potential to act as a highly competent teammate by providing insights into derived events that are often not visible to human teammates.

While the above enterprise use cases are taken from general industry guidelines, Gartner has provided its own for this report:

• Empowering employees to develop and manage more complicated technical projects, whether micro-automations or larger projects, using natural language;
• Automating customer experiences by leveraging data analytics to make highly calculated decisions at every step; And
• Transform decision-making and improve organizational situational awareness through faster data analysis and predictive intelligence.