Global professional services company Accenture made several announcements to coincide with CES 2025. Among these announcements is the release of the Technology Vision 2025 research report, which highlighted AI and autonomy as key areas of development this year.
According to the report, leaders in 2025 should “prepare for an imminent world in which AI is everywhere and acting autonomously on behalf of people.” It states that opportunities will be lost unless business leaders in the space secure enough trust from employees and consumers to engage with AI’s unprecedented capabilities.
“Our 25th Technology Vision gives leaders a look into what’s ahead when AI continuously learns, acts autonomously with and on behalf of people, and pushes enterprises and the people who use it into new and exciting ways to continuously reinvent,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. “But unlocking the benefits of AI will only be possible if leaders seize the opportunity to inject and develop trust in its performance and outcomes in a systematic manner so businesses and people can unlock AI’s incredible possibilities.”
Four emerging AI trends
The Technology Vision 2025 report dives into what happens when AI acts autonomously at the center of enterprise technology, speaks on behalf of your brand, inhabits robotic bodies, and collaborates on behalf of your employees.
When AI expands exponentially
Among the four emerging trends of AI that the report highlights is how GenAI transforms applications; as they become more central to enterprise IT, development costs decrease and digital agents gain autonomy.
According to the research, 77 percent of executives surveyed agreed that AI agents will reinvent how their organizations build digital systems and 78 percent of them agree that digital ecosystems will need to be built for AI agents as much as for humans over the next three to five years.
Protecting brand voice in the AI age
While AI agents can personalize customer interactions at scale, protecting your unique brand voice is critical to avoid messaging and interactions becoming generic. If an organization increasingly utilizes third-party chat platforms and agents, it runs the risk of losing the uniqueness of its brand voice as these third-party platforms are often designed to be generic-sounding.
Accenture maintains that they’re not calling for enterprises to turn away from autonomy or AI in customer experience, but rather to use personified AI to marry AI’s scale and efficiency with the humanizing power of a company’s brand and values.
“Companies that successfully introduce AI with personalities are looking at a technology that can build relationships with customers and meet their needs at an unprecedented scale,” the survey states. “They’re taking personified brand, and personified AI, and they’re inventing the personified business.”
According to the survey results, 80 percent of executives agreed that chatbots that all sound the same are creating differentiation challenges for organizations like their own. Additionally, 95 percent of executives report establishing or maintaining a consistent personality will be important or very important to their customer-facing AI agents over the next three years.
It’s all about preserving trust and it is critical to keep chatbots aligned with your brand through meticulously reviewing and continuously monitoring their training data.
Foundation models are reinventing robotics
Among the other emerging AI trends include large-language models (LLMs) giving robots more autonomy in the physical world, allowing them to better understand the physics of their environments, have spatial awareness, interact with people, and understand complex instructions.
Foundation models have unlocked a new chapter in robotics which has reduced limitations on robots that relegated them to factories and warehouses. Generalist robotics software, adaptable to various tasks and environments, is driving new interest in multi-purpose robot hardware.
“Now is the time to start building your robotic future,” the report states. “As robots with generalist brains and bodies learn to navigate new environments, connect with people in them, and ‘think’ through problems autonomously, their reach and impact will vastly and rapidly expand. Robots are about to go places they have never gone before, and it’s up to you to reimagine your business for this new world.
Executives surveyed (74 percent) agreed that their organization sees the promise of adaptable and intelligent robots.
Growing the autonomy of people and AI
Distrust around GenAI is holding back its adoption, along with its potential, and the solution– according to this survey– lies within GenAI’s accessibility.
“[GenAI’s] rapidly becoming ubiquitous, enabling leaders to enhance jobs and ignite innovation from the ground up,” the report states. “Unlike traditional top-down automation, GenAI can foster a dynamic interplay between workers and AI. By pivoting from mere automation to fostering autonomy, and equipping employees to steer their own AI initiatives, leaders can transform every employee into an innovator.”
By shifting from automation to autonomy, organizations can unlock new skills and boost engagement, while also fueling innovation. Through the distribution of AI and the empowerment of employees with autonomy, enterprises can gain exponential innovation and growth.
Part of this is upskilling employees to utilize GenAI tools. According to the report, 68 percent of executives said there’s a need for upskilling or reskilling their employees, including those with disabilities, in GenAI tools within the next three years.
Additionally, 95 percent said that they expect tasks their employees perform will moderately or significantly shift to innovation over the next three years with the influx of automation enabled by GenAI.
To utilize the full power of GenAI, organizations must prioritize employee buy-in and engage their workforce in planning, clearly communicate innovation goals and long-term vision, and address concerns about job automation.
“Advancements in digitizing knowledge, new AI models, agentic AI systems and architecture enables enterprises to create their own unique cognitive digital brains,” said Karthik Narain, group chief executive – Technology and CTO at Accenture. “While conventional technologies have long supported pre-determined business needs, this is a generational moment of transition. The autonomy created by these generalized AI systems can help organizations be more dynamic and intention-driven than ever. It will allow leaders to rethink how digital systems are designed, how people work, and reinvent how they create products and interact with customers. But trust underpins it all, as systems will only ever be as autonomous as they are trustworthy.”
Accenture has made several major announcements for the AI space, including the launch of an AI refinery for agentic AI. Read more about how agentic AI solutions can streamline workflows and drive business value.