How the workplace will evolve in 2025

Leaders from IBM, Accenture, Mastercard, share their top 3 predictions for how the workplace will evolve in 2025

Jean Paik. Business Insider. Jan 16, 2025.

This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

2024 was a year of major transformations in the workforce: the surge in AI adoption, shifts in the makeup of the C-suite, and new approaches to worker well-being and DEI initiatives.

For the final roundtable of Business Insider's Workforce Innovation series, Rebecca Knight, a contributing reporter for BI, asked board members to predict the most important changes for the workforce in 2025.

In their predictions, participants highlighted the advancement of AI agents and search results as well as the importance of learning opportunities to help employees keep up with new technology.

They also discussed the trend toward skills-focused hiring and talent management — but they also emphasized the challenges of executing it.

"I think there can be a difference between larger organizations that have been focused on this for a while versus midsize and smaller companies that perhaps are just starting that journey," said Purvi Tailor, the vice president of human resources at Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA.

Jack Azagury, the group chief executive for consulting at Accenture, shared his company's experience implementing skills-based HR during the pandemic, when it had to retrain more than 100,000 employees on cloud technology.

"We've been on the journey for about 10 years on skills-based HR," he said. "It took a while to get it right."

The roundtable participants were:

• Anant Adya, executive vice president, service offering head, and head of Americas delivery, Infosys

• Jack Azagury, group chief executive for consulting, Accenture

• Lucrecia Borgonovo, chief talent and organizational effectiveness officer, Mastercard

• Kenon Chen, executive vice president of strategy and growth, Clear Capital

• Maggie Hulce, chief revenue officer, Indeed

• Shane Koller, senior vice president and chief people officer, Ancestry

• Justina Nixon-Saintil, vice president and chief impact officer, IBM

• Marjorie Powell, chief HR officer and senior vice president, AARP

• Purvi Tailor, vice president of human resources, Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA

• Sharawn Tipton, chief people and culture officer, LiveRamp

Rebecca Knight: What do you predict will be the single most important change in the workforce in 2025? And what advice do you have for business leaders to prepare themselves for that change?

AI search, workflows, and ethics

Kenon Chen: I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think it'll have a really large impact, which is the idea of an AI-first search. This is where the search funnel is providing direct answers as opposed to just a ranked set of results. I think of it as summary-before-source results.

There are a number of companies looking at adopting this technology in-house as a way of modernizing the knowledge base and providing employees with direct searchable information to do their jobs.

It really changes the historical barriers to accessing subject-matter expertise within a company. To access someone who used to be the owner of that data or the one who knew the most about that subject, you had to engage their time. In this new world, you can bypass all of that and get an answer. But it might not be the most accurate answer.

If it's leveraged well, I think companies can actually have a really strong competitive advantage, because making data more available to employees can help people have shared goals and derive their value from achieving that shared goal together as opposed to just managing data currency.

Justina Nixon-Saintil: There's been a lot of talk about AI agents. I think there are two areas that companies have to really focus on for 2025. One is how do you balance innovation versus executing some of these AI systems in the most

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Episode 3879 - Jan 21 - Tiếng Anh - Nơi làm việc sẽ phát triển như thế nào năm 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time