AI Agents: Ferrari in a Garage and Other Top Trends to Watch in 2025

Welcome to 2025: a world where disruption is no longer a buzzword but a mandate. For the intrapreneurs navigating corporate ecosystems and businesses striving to stay relevant, understanding the forces shaping the landscape isn’t optional—it’s existential.

Efficiency, disruption, and transformative technologies like AI and quantum computing are more than headlines; they’re opportunities and challenges that will separate the winners from the also-rans. Let’s dive into what’s next.

Efficiency and disruption

With billionaires like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy taking over the newly created Department for Government Efficiency under the upcoming Trump administration, the calls for efficiency in the corporate world will only intensify. Already 2023 was announced as a “year of efficiency” in Meta and many CEOs followed suite. For the rest of us, the non-C-level mortals, this usually translates in a simple (!) task: to generate more revenues at less cost. In the name of Her Majesty, The Efficiency, X runs on 80% less employees than its predecessor Twitter. Thousand of job cuts were announced in 2024 by many big companies, and the trend shows no sign of stopping. Since there is only so much of efficiency that can be achieved with job cuts, Disruption will be the old new word, added to the corporate buzzword slang, inspired by the so-called by The Economist “Disruption-in-chief” Elon Musk. Closing employment doors in some areas will open doors in new ones for those who are ready to learn and adapt while "getting things done". With that in mind, maybe it’s time to re-read Clay Christensen’s Theory of Disruptive Innovation. Ideas from Eric Ries’  “The Lean Startup” and  “The Startup Way” are likely to resurface too.

AI Agents: AI on steroids

According to a blog post of Microsoft, an AI agent takes the power of generative AI a step further, because instead of just assisting you, agents can work alongside you or even on your behalf. AI agents can do a range of things from responding to questions to more complicated or multistep assignments. What sets them apart from a personal assistant or Gen AI tool is that they can be tailored to have a particular expertise and work autonomously without your, or any human, involvement. Let me remind you of a famous case from 2013 in which a security check on a Verizon, US company, has revealed that one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China.  The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay and reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job, reported BBC. In 2025 you can deploy an AI agent instead. Make sure not to breach company security. Indeed, Gen AI and AI Agents are like powerful Ferraris in the garages of the big, and small companies. Many of them know it’s there, but don’t know how to use it yet.

Quantum

Just as blockchain was the corporate buzzword in 2017-18, ESG and DEI were everywhere in 2020-21, Metaverse - in 2022, quantum will be BIG in 2025. With a very high probability we can easily foresee that ”Quantum” will be a cover story at least once of Harvard Business Review and multiple times of MIT Technology Review. As we speak consultancies as McKinsey, BCG and the likes are creating tens of decks on the topic, ready to create a high-level strategy for you. Quantum’s fame skyrocketed in the mainstream media in the end of December 2024, when CNBC and others reported that Google’s new quantum chip, Willow, drastically reduces computation times. This means that its speed and accuracy could theoretically provide hackers with the tools to unlock the algorithms that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built upon. Bitcoin quickly lost some value at the announcement. If AI Agents are Ferraris in the garage, the impact of quantum on your business is more like a SpaceX rocket at a launch pad. Already in 2022 HBR predicted quantum computing can better optimize investment strategies, improve encryption, discover products, and much more. The companies who manage to find the practical use of quantum will win the 2025 and beyond race.

Intrapreneurship

Quantum chip breakthrough was build by a team of Google engineers. The iPhone itself was created not by Steve Jobs, but by his entrepreneurial employees who had the skills, knowledge, resources and courage to go to him and pitch their idea (allegedly several times before Jobs said yes). Considering AI, quantum computing and other big technological leaps, companies will need more than ever their employees to be “intrepreneurs” and quickly find practical business applications and use cases of the new discoveries. Many companies already run workshop and programs of AI use cases creation. The race is fierce and the external consultants are expensive and time-consuming, not in line with the efficiency goals. Disruption will be needed from within. And although the term “intrapreneurs” was first used in 1975 in a white paper titled "Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship" for the Tarrytown School for Entrepreneurs and popularised in February 1985 in Time magazine article "Here Come the Intrapreneurs”, the concept of internal entrepreneurs working within the big companies - “intrapreneurs” - will make a comeback in 2025.

Cybersecurity

It is easy to think that all those money saved from efficiency and disruption will go into the hands of top managers and shareholders, and part of it might be true. But some of the savings will need to be deployed in new areas in order to keep the businesses running. It is a good time to work in cybersecurity, as Gartner expects that cybersecurity spending is expected to increase 15% in 2025, from $183.9 billion to $212 billion. Security services lead the way for the segment expecting the most spending growth, with security software coming in second and network security as the third area of growth, says Security Intelligence.

Women on the Rise

According to Bloomberg women are controlling ever-greater sums of money around the world, setting the stage for major shifts in wealth management and philanthropy. In the US alone, McKinsey & Co. expects women to control $34 trillion — or roughly 38% — of investable assets by 2030, close to double last year’s total. The figure was just $7.3 trillion, or 29%, 10 years ago. According to Wharton School professor Mauro F. Guillén, by 2030 women will own more than half the world’s total wealth. This will have huge implications for the wealth management businesses, but also for philanthropy and other areas. 2025 seems to be pivotal in that trend. Incidentally all major world sports events in 2025 are women related. The most prominent quadrennial competitions for this year, based on Wikipedia, are the 2025 Women's Rugby World Cup in England, the 2025 UEFA Women's European Championships in Switzerland and the 2025 Women's Cricket World Cup in India. Also no-one can accuse Donald Trump of being a DEI activist, but he has appointed Susie Wiles as America’s first ever female chief-of-staff. To be fair, he has also named at least 5 billionaires in his administration, according to The Economist, and none of them are female, but that’s another story.

GenAlpha is the new kid on the blog

If you are up to here reading and listening about GenZ, their shopping preferences and peculiar remote-first work habits and demands, you can take a breather in 2025. There will be a new kid on the block - GenAlpha. According to BBC the youngest consumers, born after 2010, can't yet drive themselves to the shops, but it won't stop them from buying like their millennial parents. As an estimated 2.5m Gen Alphas are born weekly. Their demographic's economic footprint, said BBC, is expected to reach 5.4 trillion US dollars by 2029 – almost as much as the spending power of the millennial and Gen Z combined. Mccrindle report that once Gen Alphas have all been born they will number more than 2 billion, the largest generation in the history of the world. It will be also the first  AI-native generation. 2025 is the year when conversation about GenAlpha will explode.

Health and Longevity

On January 1, 2025 Netflix debuts a documentary, which we predict to be an immediate hit. Titled “Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever”, it follows the quest for longevity of Bryan Johnson, a tech millionaire, who spends over 2 million dollars a year on a quest to his his immortality (or as close to it as humanly possible). Bryan’s so called “Blueprint” to longevity includes taking the right supplements, foods, exercise and daily habits. Being the face and first client of his company, Bryan is also hoping to make a hefty profit selling Blueprint food, protein, supplements and the infamous 35 dollar bottle of extra virgin oil. With over a million followers on Instagram and rising in TikTok, he has already exceeded in popularity David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Peter Attia, author of the bestseller “Outlive” and another researcher known for his work in longevity medicine. AI is expected to contribute at unprecedented ways in the healthcare discoveries as soon as 2025, and drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy for weight control add to the picture of an area heavy for expectations of breakthrough discoveries.

Remodeling of ESG and DEI

Staring in 2023, the backlash of the American conservatives against ESG - environment, social and governance factors - lead of the CEO of BlackRock Larry Fink to publicly admit he will stop using the term ESG. He did not say he will stop caring about ESG. The need to incorporate the ESG factors into the business operations will continue to be important in 2025 and beyond, despite Elon Musk’s “DEI must die” post on X. A big number of companies, among which Microsoft, Boeing, Google and Meta either dismantled their DIE departments or cut some of the DEI programs and pledges in 2024. It does not mean that incorporating ESG factors in the business or building a diverse and inclusive environment will be less valuable to the companies. But as The Economist editor Sacha Nauta writes “As “chief diversity officers”, driven to correct the worlds’s injustices, are replaced by HR types with more modest, less divisive goals, DEI may re-emerge as something closer to its original purpose”.

2025, Intraprenership Lab