Michael Ramsey, the GVP of Product Management, CRM, and Industry workflows at ServiceNow, explains why it’s more important than ever for companies to double down on their CRM investment. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

CRM software has become a staple of modern business, with roughly 90 percent of mid-sized companies already using some form of CRM system. But the real question is: Does the way these businesses currently use CRM (often focused narrowly on sales tracking or contact management) still meet the evolving, end-to-end needs of customer engagement, service, and success across the entire organization?

Too often, CRM is viewed narrowly as sales force automation (SFA)—a digital Rolodex or pipeline tracker. That view stems from SFA being the first productized segment of CRM, but it no longer fits today’s reality.

CRM now spans marketing, sales, and service, including field service, contact centers, and workforce management. A customer-centric CRM strategy starts with understanding the full customer lifecycle: discovering products (pre-sales), purchasing or renewing (sales), and post-sale interactions like fixing issues, modifying accounts, or disputing bills.

At each of these moments, customers engage with purpose. CRM should capture why they’re reaching out and empower teams to respond with context. This is modern CRM: a unified platform that delivers seamless, high-quality experiences across the entire journey, giving customers exactly what they want.

The Power of a Unified Platform Approach

Behind every successful customer experience is a well-orchestrated internal operation. But for many businesses, customer data lives in silos—marketing systems, support tools, billing platforms, spreadsheets. The result? Incomplete context, misaligned teams, and disjointed service. A unified platform approach connects the dots. It combines systems, data, and processes used by the front, middle, and back office, as well as sales, fulfillment, service, finance, and operations, so that work flows seamlessly.

Consider a national retailer with both e-commerce and physical stores. A customer orders online, then visits the store to ask about the status. If the CRM is connected across systems, the store associate can instantly access the customer’s complete order history, update shipping preferences, and log the interaction for future follow-up.

When systems are disconnected, these moments of truth become friction points. When systems are unified, they become opportunities to build loyalty. Crucially, this doesn’t mean ripping and replacing every legacy tool. A composable architecture lets organizations keep trusted tools, plug in what’s missing, and evolve at their own pace without disruption. That’s the kind of flexibility businesses need and the seamless service customers expect.

 AI-Driven Customer Experiences: Beyond the Hype

The future of CRM is intelligent. With the rise of artificial intelligence, businesses can now turn customer data into insight, and insight into action.

AI doesn’t just help teams work faster. It enables organizations to anticipate customer needs, personalize every interaction, and resolve issues before they escalate. Imagine a utility provider using AI to detect outage patterns in real-time, predict service disruptions, and automatically dispatch support, keeping customers informed without a single phone call.

Even more transformative is the rise of agentic AI. These AI agents don’t just handle simple tasks—they orchestrate entire workflows, from basic to highly complex. They understand context, take action, and collaborate with other agents and human team members to complete sophisticated processes.

For example, a telecom company might deploy AI agents to orchestrate device return workflows. These agents coordinate eligibility checks, shipping logistics, and refund processing while seamlessly handing off approval decisions to human agents when needed. The workflow infrastructure provides unified visibility, allowing teams to track performance across AI and human contributors and optimize KPIs in real-time. This is CRM powered by intelligence—proactive, scalable, and designed for human-AI collaboration.

Breaking Down the Front, Middle, and Back Office Divide

Truly great customer experiences require more than a polished digital customer engagement solution. Customer engagement points can look very different depending on the business. A retailer might rely on mobile apps and in-store staff, while a doctor, bank, or telecom company engages through portals, contact centers, or field service. That’s why an omnichannel CRM approach is critical: it ensures consistent, contextual experiences no matter where or how a customer engages.

Building CRM solutions that connect every function involved in delivering customer expectations, from sales and support to operations and finance, is critical to making that omnichannel approach a reality. A travel company recently integrated its booking, loyalty, and service tools. Now, when a traveler calls about a disruption, the agent can easily see how they’ve interacted with the company digitally to rebook flights, apply loyalty compensation, and follow up automatically. The customer sees one fluid experience, even though multiple departments and touchpoints are involved.

Removing these internal silos isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a cultural shift. It means rethinking how teams collaborate and how platforms support that collaboration. The payoff is faster resolution, fewer errors, and a more cohesive brand experience.

Today’s customers want options. They might start with a chatbot, continue by phone, and follow up over email, all within the same interaction. A modern CRM must support these journeys without forcing customers to start over at every step. That means maintaining context across channels and ensuring every team member or AI agent can access the whole picture.

For example, a home goods retailer adopted omnichannel CRM tools that carry interaction history from chat to phone to store. As a result, they’ve reduced support times and improved customer satisfaction while lowering operating costs.

This approach isn’t about being everywhere at once. It’s about deeply understanding why customers engage with your brand, whether researching products, making a purchase, requesting service, or looking to renew or expand. A thoughtful CRM strategy organizes your business around those moments, making it easy to surface, capture, and fulfill requests efficiently and carefully. It’s about designing a customer experience that’s proactive, intentional, and always ready to meet them where they are.

A New Era of CRM

More than ever, customers judge companies based on how easy it is to interact with them. A well-orchestrated CRM strategy turns that ease into a competitive edge. This isn’t about checking a box or implementing software for its own sake. It’s about shifting from transactional thinking to relationship thinking—and building the infrastructure to support it.

CRM has the potential to be a strategic engine for delivering the experiences customers want across every phase of their journey. From pre-sales discovery to purchasing, fulfillment, service, and renewals, the goal is to support internal processes and create consistent, valuable experiences that make it easier for customers to get what they need.

Organizations that view CRM with this wider lens aren’t just more efficient; they’re more aligned to their customers’ real needs. They learn faster, adapt faster, and deliver better outcomes at scale. The companies that will lead in the years ahead are those that treat CRM not as a system of record or a departmental tool but as the foundation for orchestrating thoughtful, connected customer experiences.

In a world where expectations are higher and loyalty is harder to earn, doubling down on CRM isn’t just smart, it’s essential.

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Mike Reynolds, a Principal Solutions Architect for Technology Platform Partnerships at Contentful, outlines how front office modernization can help companies deliver a B2C experience for B2B buyers. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

An engaging and easy-to-use website is the hallmark of all digital shopping experiences. Features such as aesthetic designs, easy navigation, and personalization draw in customers, can drive new revenue growth, and cultivate a brand’s image while strengthening loyalty.

Many brands believe that they’ve already captured their B2B audience, but as the commerce environment evolves, investing in current customer experiences is just as important as fostering new relationships. The need for efficiency, reduced costs, and innovation has already led to significant improvements in the back office for many organizations, but now, it’s time to bring the B2B front office up to speed.

Meeting the Needs of Today’s Tech-Savvy (and Selective) Customers

Today’s B2B customers are digital natives. This generation of buyers has grown up around the internet, smartphones, streaming services, and other technology. The same desire for digital convenience they experience as a regular consumer extends to the office and their work. But many businesses still have customers suffering through rigid, outdated systems to complete simple purchasing tasks. These systems force customers to go through tedious manual steps to find what they’re looking for, like navigating through digital versions of print catalogs or waiting on an account representative to answer a simple question, update them on new products, or place an order.

B2B buyers are accustomed to having choices, and they expect brands to be able to deliver what they need at any time, anywhere, and on the channel they prefer. Not to mention, most are already spending a significant amount of time and energy navigating internal procurement processes to make a purchase and don’t have the bandwidth to jump through additional hoops. They need a process that is intuitive and streamlined.

Across industries, technology is rapidly advancing to anticipate and meet these evolving consumer requirements. This puts businesses at a crossroads, where they can either choose to adapt or risk losing customers to other vendors as customer expectations continue to rise.

Advancing the Front Office for Optimized Operations

A modern B2B self-service customer portal puts customers’ needs at their fingertips. Today, an ideal B2B portal gives customers real-time access to their quotes, orders, service tickets, and inventory and offers relevant product suggestions. This creates a more user-friendly experience and helps buyers breeze through purchases faster while providing options to make more informed decisions, ultimately driving long-term loyalty.

Additionally, by synchronizing front-office modernization with enterprise resource planning (ERP) updates, B2B businesses can generate new revenue streams while offsetting transformation costs.

How a Self-Service Experience Creates User Empowerment

Self-service user portals offer a consistent, seamless, and intuitive experience across touchpoints, from initial engagement to purchase and beyond. For B2B sellers, offering this kind of user empowerment increases customer satisfaction and frees up time for teams to focus on other high-value initiatives.

When B2B buyers have instant access to real-time inventory updates, personalized product recommendations, and the ability to initiate and track returns, customer service teams have more time to focus on exceptional consumer interactions. Under these circumstances, teams can strengthen business relationships and improve overall efficiency.

Additionally, utilizing a digital experience platform that offers flexible content management tools makes integrating rich, relevant content into the customer journey seamless. This allows for faster content release cycles, enabling marketing and merchandising teams to invest their primary focus in developing a quality, on-brand experience.

It’s Time to Future Proof

Modernizing the front office isn’t just about keeping pace—it’s about staying ahead. Companies that limit their technological capabilities within their content management systems restrict their ability to grow and remain competitive. Especially in today’s competitive market, moving beyond outdated technology to create smoother commerce experiences can differentiate a brand and strengthen customer relationships.

By prioritizing the B2B buying experiences, businesses will gain crucial competitive advantages over slow adopters through increased customer loyalty and revenue, as well as improved operational efficiency. Those who fail to adapt risk losing customers to other vendors. Future-proofing your business with the right tools is critical to meeting customer expectations, no matter where technology trends go next month or in the years to come.

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The editors at Solutions Review have summarized some of the most significant ways AI has impacted marketing jobs, hiring, skillsets, and more.

One of the least surprising things someone can say in 2025 is that artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted marketing jobs. What is less clear is the specific impact AI has had on those jobs and whether marketers have cause for concern. As we see AI integrated into marketing operations at unprecedented levels, the form and function of a company’s marketing team will inevitably continue changing and evolving.

To keep track of those changes, the Solutions Review editors have outlined some of the primary ways AI has changed marketing, what marketers can do to remain agile during those changes, and what the future may hold for them and the technologies they use.

Note: These insights were informed through web research using advanced scraping techniques and generative AI tools. Solutions Review editors use a unique multi-prompt approach to extract targeted knowledge and optimize content for relevance and utility.

How Has AI Changed the Marketing Workforce?

In just a few years, the integration of AI into marketing has dramatically restructured the roles, responsibilities, and required skill sets in the marketing industry. This transformation has been freeing for many, as AI has streamlined their workloads and empowered them to focus on more specialized, high-value tasks and projects. However, it’s not uncommon for marketers to feel uneasy about the rapid adoption of these technologies, as they have already proven capable of rendering some tasks and roles nearly obsolete. Here are some of the job roles that have been impacted the most by AI:

Data Analysis

Traditional market researchers and marketing data analysts have arguably seen the most disruption from AI. Where these professionals were previously responsible for collecting and analyzing large data sets, LLMs can perform the same task exponentially faster than humans. Rather than relying on historical data and analyses, AI allows marketers and data scientists to forecast trends and customer behavior accurately. These predictive marketing capabilities make it easier and more cost-effective for businesses to anticipate market shifts, prepare strategies to respond to them, and allocate resources to the priority tasks.

Content Creation

Copywriting is another area that has been hit hard by the impact of AI. While generative AI likely won’t replace copywriters entirely, these tools are restructuring how marketers create blogs, social media posts, advertising copy, and product descriptions. New generative AI tools are hitting the market all the time now, and most of them can easily reduce the time and resources it takes to get brand-specific, personalized, and targeted content out the door.

HubSpot released a report in 2024 that outlines the specific productivity gains AI can provide to marketers. In their research, they found that:

• 68 percent of marketing leaders reported ROI on their AI investment.
• 75 percent of marketers say they use AI to reduce manual task time.
• 86 percent of marketers report that AI saves them 1+ hours a day by streamlining creative tasks.

With productivity gains like that, using AI and generative AI in marketing is unlikely to go away anytime soon. There’s even potential that, as these technologies advance even further, they could eliminate some of the industry’s entry or mid-level copywriting roles, leaving content creation to a mixture of senior directors and AI tools.

Customer Management

Thanks to AI, how marketers interact with customers has also undergone significant changes. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide immediate, 24/7 customer support while gathering valuable insights on customer needs and, when needed, route customers to a human representative or even schedule a meeting on their calendar to follow up with an active or prospective customer. AI can also automate the creation of customer journey maps with complex pattern recognition tools, enabling customer management, service, and marketing teams to track, predict, and respond to more customer behaviors on more channels and with more efficiency than before.

While these roles are less likely to disappear, they will continue to evolve in response to AI technology developments, and it will fall on the human professionals to learn how to navigate and utilize these tools to maximize productivity and ensure consistent customer satisfaction.

The Emergence of AI-Centric Marketing Roles

The impact of AI on marketing is significant, but the most dramatic effect on the industry is the influx of new, AI-specific roles that these technologies have necessitated. These specialized roles range from AI content strategists to algorithmic targeting specialists and generative AI prompt engineers, and have grown rapidly. LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report says as much, reporting that AI literacy is the fastest-growing skill that “professionals are prioritizing and companies are increasingly hiring for.”

However, as AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, many functions requiring human specialists could become automated features within integrated marketing platforms. This could lead to a future where the first generation of AI marketing specialists we’re seeing enter the market could ultimately be transitional figures—bridges between traditional marketing and fully algorithmic approaches that require minimal human intervention beyond initial strategic direction.

AI-centric marketing roles will remain invaluable, and traditional marketers who don’t prepare themselves for those new roles will likely face fewer career prospects and mobility. The industry’s historical pattern of absorbing new technologies suggests that we could enter a 5-7 year window where hybrid capabilities are highly sought before a new status quo is established.

Like Mike Maynard said on Forbes, “AI is data for the masses, based on masses of data. Let AI gather all the data. Your success will be determined by whether you use it intelligently, ethically, and responsibly.” That was true when he said it in 2023, and it’s just as accurate today.

Upskilling for the Future

Upskilling has been a major buzzword the last couple of years, and with good reason. For marketers specifically, the necessity of developing AI competencies goes beyond conventional professional development—it represents an imperative that will determine career viability in the coming decade. For example, Christina Inge—author of “Marketing Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide and Marketing Metrics,” and instructor at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education’s Professional & Executive Development—says that AI might not take your job, but “It will be taken by a person who knows how to use AI. So, it is very important for marketers to know how to use AI.”

The specific skills marketers must develop go beyond basic tool proficiency. For marketers to remain competitive, they should pursue more sophisticated skills, including algorithmic literacy to understand how AI systems make decisions, data architecture expertise to ensure these systems receive appropriate inputs, ethical judgment to navigate questions of privacy and manipulation, and perhaps most critically, the ability to identify the boundaries where human judgment should supersede algorithmic recommendations. These multi-dimensional competencies cannot be acquired through conventional professional development paths or weekend workshops, but require more intentional, hands-on experiences.

For marketing leaders, this reality will demand a fundamental reconsideration of team structures, hiring criteria, and developmental pathways. The organizations that treat AI competency as merely another skill to be added to job descriptions will have a harder time navigating this transition than businesses that invest the time and resources necessary to reimagine their marketing departments as learning organizations explicitly designed to absorb, evaluate, and integrate emerging capabilities while preserving the human judgment that remains the core of marketing.

AI Will Augment Marketing Jobs, Not Replace Them

Narine Galstian—the CMO at SADA, an Insight company—sums up the impact of AI on marketing jobs like this: “To truly harness AI’s potential, marketers must adopt a human-centric approach. This means focusing on how AI can augment human capabilities rather than replace them. By combining the power of human creativity with the efficiency of AI, marketers can create truly innovative and effective campaigns.”

The AI impact on marketing jobs is an evolving, fluid thing. As clear as its repercussions have already proven to be, the continued development and integration of new AI technologies will result in the impact being an ongoing, ever-changing reality for professionals to reckon with. However, as dramatic as the effects might be, the expertise marketing professionals bring to the industry will never go out of style. They might need to pivot their skillsets to adapt to new or emerging needs, but the creativity of a human mind will remain an essential piece of marketing.

Want more insights like this? Register for Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community, which enables human conversation on AI. You can gain access for free here!

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The editors at Solutions Review are exploring the emerging AI application layer with this authoritative list of the best AI agents for marketing teams to consider working with as they streamline marketing processes.

The proliferation of generative AI has ushered in a new era of marketing automation, and AI agents are at the forefront of this transformation. From embedded copilots that analyze spreadsheets to autonomous agents that track customer behavior, answer questions, or automate marketing tasks, AI agents are shaping and reshaping how forward-thinking organizations understand and act on their marketing information.

In this up-to-date and authoritative guide, our editors will spotlight some of the top AI agents and agent platforms available today for marketing teams to help you find the right tool for your specific needs—whether you’re an email marketer looking to automate your outreach, a sales professional who wants to streamline the handoff between departments, or a customer service agent who is augmenting their team’s capabilities with AI.

This resource is designed to help you:

• Understand what makes AI agents different from traditional automation tools
• Explore the capabilities and limitations of each available agent or agent platform in the marketplace
• Choose the best solution for your team based on use case, skill level, and scalability options

Note: This list of the best AI agents for marketing was compiled through web research using advanced scraping techniques and generative AI tools. Solutions Review editors use a unique multi-prompt approach to employ targeted prompts to extract critical knowledge and optimize content for relevance and utility. Our editors also utilized Solutions Review’s weekly news distribution services to ensure the information is as close to real-time as possible. The list is organized in alphabetical order.

The Best AI Agents for Marketing Teams

AirOps

Use For: This AI workflow platform is built for content teams and blends human expertise with AI automation to drive demand at scale.

The AirOps feature suite can help marketing teams win customer attention across SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) with custom, purpose-built content. It aims to augment a company’s team and future-proof them in the “AI age” by equipping them with the resources they need to remain relevant and competitive.

Key Features:

• Automate the process of building detailed briefs that meet customer search intent.
• Define brand attributes in customizable Brand Kits that AirOps’ AI agents can use to create custom content automatically.
• Ground content with real-time data from Google Search and web scraping.
• Keep content fresh and up-to-date with tools for autonomously updating copy, links, and structure.

Get Started: Since its launch in 2023, AirOps has expanded its capabilities to help its marketing and agency users improve their SEO and AEO efforts, launch programmatic campaigns, and more. Its three pricing models—Solo, Scale, and Agency—aim to cater to different use cases and team sizes.

Conversica

Use For: Bring human-like conversational experiences to each stage of the marketing and sales funnel with Conversica’s Revenue Digital Assistants (RDAs).

Conversica’s RDAs are fueled by “billions of interactions and exchanges” and use proven skills and strategies to deliver personalized, conversational marketing experiences across channels and languages and at scale. Other use cases include personalized lead follow-ups, AI-powered lead nurturing, and GPT-powered web chats.

Key Features:

• Two-way, tailored dialog systems drive leads, prospects, and customers toward business objectives.
• Optimized fact collection ensures accurate and relevant information from a brand’s website and knowledge bases.
• RDAs can validate and schedule meetings with inbound leads.
• Out-of-the-box integrations with CRM, MAP, and Customer Success platforms.

Get Started: Conversica’s AI agents are included in its broader Conversation Automation Software for Revenue Teams suite. Companies can request a free demo to see firsthand how Conversica’s capabilities can help their marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

Gumloop

Use For: Automate your team’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, create custom social media workflows, capture real-time brand sentiment, analyze documents, and more.

Gumloop’s AI workflows and agents can be created and configured for multiple marketing automations, all from a user-friendly visual interface. For example, marketers can set up AI workflows to search Google for keywords, scan competitor sites, monitor content performance, and stay ahead of search trends.

Key Features:

• Connect to the latest models of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and more.
• Build customized SEO tooling based on custom use cases.
• Gumloop’s AI can filter through comments about a brand to track customer sentiment and inform relevant users when a situation requires their attention.
• Integrate with leading SEO, analytics, and social media tools without paying for an extra subscription.

Get Started: Gumloop offers several models to provide users or teams with the necessary capabilities to automate their work. The platform is growing rapidly—it started 2025 with a successful Series A funding round and has released new features and updates for its toolset every month.

Lyzr AI

Use For: Automate content creation, campaign management, customer engagement, and other marketing efforts with over 40 unique AI agents.

Lyzr’s AI agents can help your team automate dozens of marketing functions across departments and campaigns. Teams can also build reliable, private, and self-learning AI agents with the Lyzr Agent Studio. If needed, the team at Lyzr can even help their users build custom agents over a call.

Key Features:

• Automate campaign scheduling and execution efforts.
• Generate SEO blogs, articles, newsletters, and ad copies with Lyzr’s Content Generation Agent.
• Use agents through Lyzr’s SaaS platform or host them within your own infrastructure
• Connect smoothly with the CRM, 
ERP, LLMs, and cloud platforms your team already uses.

Get Started: In addition to Lyzr’s AI agent builder, companies can utilize Skott, a fully private AI marketer that runs locally on the client’s cloud. Skott can generate blogs, perform market research, publish content across channels, and ensure information is protected in the cloud.

Salesforce

Use For: Salesforce’s Agentforce suite includes AI-powered, agent-driven tools for launching marketing campaigns, creating targeted content, and driving unified customer conversations.

Users have multiple avenues for creating agents with Salesforce. For example, they can customize an out-of-the-box agent to a specific industry or use case, use natural-language instructions to tell Agentforce the tasks they want an agent to manage, or start by assigning a goal to the agent and adding guardrails or further instructions as needed.

Key Features:

• Create custom, predictive AI models in several clicks, with no coding required.
• Scale content personalization by having Agentforce automatically generate on-brand content for each target audience.
• Use agents to create target audience segments in minutes.
• Connect customers to AI agents for service requests (i.e., appointment booking, offer redemptions, etc.).

Get Started: Agentforce is an AI-powered, low-code agent builder that streamlines the process of creating and customizing agents. Users can simply write a description of the agent they want to develop, and the system will help them build it. Pro-code tools are also available to teams who need to take their agents even further.

Zapier

Use For: Build and deploy intelligent AI agents with plain English prompts in just a few minutes. The agents can process leads in seconds, answer emails, help sales teams manage calendars, and more.

When configuring a behavior trigger or action field with Zapier’s Agents, users can instruct the agent to always use the same value, pick from a specific set of values, have it guess the value, or not set any value. For example, users can create agents for multiple use cases, including sales, internal meetings, customer support, or email marketing.

Key Features:

• Zapier Agents automatically sync with the latest data from other platforms in a tech stack.
• Set up behaviors to handle everything from sending your team reminders to updating your CRM.
• Personalize outreach with agents that study customer profiles and use the data to create personalized emails.
• Qualify inbound leads with an agent that researches new leads and enriches them with key details.

Get Started: Zapier Agents are currently in beta. The free option allows users to experiment with AI agents, while the paid plans enable them to scale as their team and goals change over time.

Want the full list? Register for Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community, which enables human conversation on AI. You can gain access for free here!

The post 13 of the Best AI Agents for Marketing Teams to Consider in 2025 appeared first on Top CRM and Customer Relationship Management, Vendors, Companies, & Solutions.

Abhinandan Jain, the Chief Growth Officer at Startek, explains why organizations need to prioritize customer experience (CX) transformation to adapt to consumer expectations. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Customer experience (CX) is evolving at an unprecedented pace. With digital transformation reshaping industries, businesses must continuously adapt to meet consumer expectations. The modern customer seeks instant, seamless, and hyper-personalized interactions through apps, websites, chatbots, or in-store visits. However, while technology is critical in this transformation, the human element remains irreplaceable. The best CX strategies blend digital efficiency with human empathy, ensuring that businesses provide fast and intelligent service and build trust and loyalty.

Understanding the Modern Consumer

Today’s consumers are more connected and informed than ever before. With access to vast amounts of information and a variety of platforms for interaction, they expect brands to engage with them in real-time. A single poor experience can cause them to switch brands, making CX a key differentiator. Studies suggest that 80 percent of consumers will leave a brand after a negative interaction, highlighting the critical role of customer satisfaction.

Consumer expectations are shaped by speed, personalization, and convenience. They expect businesses to predict their needs, offer tailored solutions, and provide effortless service across all touchpoints. The demand for personalized experiences is stronger than ever—customers want recommendations based on their preferences, purchase history, and browsing behavior. Furthermore, omnichannel engagement is a priority, with consumers expecting a unified experience across mobile apps, websites, in-store interactions, and customer support channels.

However, while automation and AI-driven interactions are appreciated for their efficiency, customers still crave human connection, especially in moments of complexity, frustration, or high-value decision-making. This balance between technology and human support is what defines modern CX transformation.

Digital Transformation: The Foundation of CX Evolution

Businesses are increasingly investing in AI, automation, and predictive analytics to meet customer demands. A digital-first approach allows organizations to predict consumer behavior, streamline engagement, and personalize experiences at scale. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants ensure round-the-clock support, reducing wait times and enhancing satisfaction. Predictive analytics enable businesses to optimize marketing strategies, manage inventory, and improve decision-making based on real-time customer insights.

However, digital transformation should not be about replacing human interactions but enhancing them. While AI-driven systems can handle routine inquiries and automate responses, complex issues, and emotionally charged situations require human intervention. Human agents add value where technology falls short, providing reassurance, building relationships, and handling nuanced customer concerns with empathy. Businesses that effectively combine automation with human-led service see greater engagement, trust, and long-term loyalty.

The Role of AI and Data Analytics in Personalization

Personalization has become a cornerstone of modern CX. Consumers engage more with brands that anticipate their needs and offer relevant experiences. AI and advanced data analytics allow businesses to create highly customized interactions by analyzing customer behavior in real-time.

AI-driven customer segmentation enables businesses to target specific audience groups with relevant messaging, improving engagement and conversion rates. Automated recommendations, whether in the form of personalized product suggestions or tailored promotions, create a sense of exclusivity and individual attention. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can respond instantly to routine inquiries while escalating more complex concerns to human agents.

However, personalization should be thoughtful and ethical. Consumers are increasingly aware of data privacy issues and expect brands to handle their information responsibly. Transparency in data collection and ethical AI usage are crucial to maintaining consumer trust. Businesses that balance personalization and privacy will gain a competitive edge in the evolving CX landscape.

Creating a Unified Omnichannel Experience

Consumers today move seamlessly between online and offline interactions, and they expect businesses to provide a consistent experience across all channels. Whether they start a conversation via social media, continue it on a website, or complete a purchase in-store, they do not want to repeat themselves. A fragmented customer journey leads to frustration and disengagement.

To create a frictionless omnichannel experience, businesses must integrate customer data across all platforms. AI-powered customer data platforms unify customer history, preferences, and interactions, ensuring seamless communication across all touchpoints. AI-driven tools can also predict customer needs and provide proactive recommendations, enhancing engagement at every stage.

Moreover, a strong omnichannel strategy involves combining digital efficiency with human intervention. While chatbots and automation can handle routine inquiries, human agents must be available for complex interactions. This approach ensures that customers receive the right level of service at the right time, improving overall satisfaction and retention.

Emerging Technologies Reshaping CX

The future of CX is being shaped by emerging technologies that enhance customer interactions, making them more intelligent, immersive, and seamless. Businesses integrating these innovations into their CX strategies will stay ahead of the competition.

• Generative AI is revolutionizing CX by creating highly personalized, dynamic customer interactions. It enables businesses to generate real-time responses, craft customized messaging, and automate complex problem-solving while maintaining a human-like conversational experience.
• Agentic AI goes beyond traditional automation by enabling AI-driven agents to make autonomous decisions, learn from interactions, and adapt CX strategies in real-time. This self-improving technology allows businesses to deliver hyper-personalized, context-aware experiences without human intervention.
• Edge Computing enables faster, real-time data processing closer to the customer, reducing latency and improving responsiveness. This is particularly beneficial for retail, healthcare, and financial services industries, where real-time decision-making is crucial.
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are transforming how businesses engage with customers. From virtual try-ons in fashion and beauty to immersive shopping experiences, these technologies allow consumers to interact with products before purchasing, increasing confidence and reducing returns.
• Voice AI also plays a growing role in CX, allowing customers to interact with brands via voice commands. Smart virtual assistants provide hands-free, conversational experiences, making customer support more intuitive and efficient.
• Blockchain technology enhances security and transparency in customer interactions, particularly in financial services and e-commerce. It ensures secure transactions, builds trust, and protects customer data from cyber threats.

While these technologies drive efficiency, businesses must ensure they enhance, rather than replace, human engagement. The best CX strategies will integrate innovation while maintaining authenticity and emotional connection.

Building a Human-Centric CX Culture

Technology can only take CX transformation so far—a customer-first mindset must be embedded within an organization. Businesses that foster a human-centric culture empower employees to deliver meaningful, personalized experiences that go beyond automation.

Providing employees with CX training and AI-assisted tools enables them to respond effectively to customer needs. Gathering continuous customer feedback allows businesses to refine their approach in real-time, ensuring that CX strategies remain relevant. Leadership commitment to CX excellence is also essential—organizations that align internal goals with customer satisfaction create a culture of proactive problem-solving and innovation.

The Future of CX: A Balance Between AI and Human Engagement

As AI and automation continue to advance, the most successful businesses will be those that combine technology with human insight. AI can handle repetitive tasks and optimize efficiency, but human interaction remains critical for building trust, resolving complex issues, and creating emotional connections.

CX transformation is about more than just technology upgrades—it’s about creating experiences that feel personal, effortless, and meaningful. The future of CX will be shaped by generative AI, agentic AI, AI-driven automation, ethical data practices, and seamless human-AI collaboration. Businesses that balance automation and empathy will drive higher engagement, brand loyalty, and long-term success.

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Christoffer Klemming, the CEO and co-founder of Waitwhile, explains how tech solutions have the potential to turn the frustration of waiting in lines into business growth. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Emotions dominate—this is the first design principle of waiting lines. They color the experience and, more importantly, how it will be remembered. They also impact people’s judgments. Waiting may be an inescapable part of life, but that doesn’t mean we enjoy it. Nowadays, when nearly everything can be done with a few taps on a screen, long lines stand out as a glaring inefficiency. Whether it’s a crowded coffee shop, a backed-up pharmacy, or a busy government office, waiting in line creates frustration that doesn’t just end with the experience. It lingers.

A 2023 study by PwC found that 73 percent of shoppers say experience is the most critical factor in their purchasing decisions. Despite this, long wait times remain a common—and costly—issue, driving customers to abandon purchases, switch to competitors, or rethink their loyalty altogether.

But wait times don’t just impact customers. Businesses are feeling the strain, too. Long lines create inefficiencies, overburden staff, and reduce operational capacity. This isn’t a problem for the future; it’s happening now and demands immediate solutions.

For the third consecutive year, Waitwhile conducted The State of Waiting in Line study to understand the full impact of waiting. The results reveal how deeply waiting affects consumer behavior and how technology can transform the waiting experience into an opportunity. Here’s some of what we found.

Long Waits Have High Costs

When customers encounter long waits, they walk away, sometimes for good. Research conducted by Ryan Buell, a Harvard Business School professor, emphasizes how such behavior not only affects the customer but also severely impacts the service provider’s bottom line.

According to Waitwhile’s latest survey, nearly 80 percent of consumers avoid businesses where they see or expect a line, while 40 percent will abandon their purchase or choose a competitor instead. When customers leave a queue, it’s not only a single missed transaction but also an erosion of trust and loyalty. Consumers are less likely to return to businesses where they’ve had a frustrating experience.

But the real cost goes beyond lost sales. Waiting takes a psychological toll, amplifying negative feelings like frustration and impatience. Research from Frontiers in Psychology shows that wasted time can lead to a perception of lost control, making delays feel even worse. For businesses, this means that every minute a customer waits risks immediate revenue and long-term trust and loyalty.

A Remedy for The Great Frustration

With smart queue management, businesses can turn frustration into opportunity. Technology offers solutions that make waiting shorter—or eliminate it entirely. Virtual queue systems allow customers to join a line remotely using their smartphones. Instead of standing in a physical queue, they can wait wherever they prefer, reducing frustration while giving businesses more control over customer flow.

Virtual queues are particularly effective in peak periods, offering real-time insights into demand. This enables staff to anticipate bottlenecks, optimize service times, and create a smoother overall experience. In fact, 52 percent of consumers in Waitwhile’s survey said they prefer virtual queues to traditional lines​.

Appointment scheduling is another transformative solution. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they would rather book a specific time slot than stand in line, reflecting a growing demand for predictability and personalization. Beyond improving customer satisfaction, these tools allow businesses to allocate staff and resources better, ensuring a seamless service experience even during busy times.

Turning Waiting Into a Win

One of the key drivers of emotional responses is expectation. Research shows that the memory of an event often outweighs the experience itself, which means exceeding customer expectations is critical for creating lasting positive impressions. Rather than viewing wait times as a liability, businesses can turn them into opportunities to engage customers and drive revenue. Waitwhile’s data shows that 41 percent of consumers shop or browse while waiting virtually, creating valuable moments for upselling and cross-selling.

Digital tools like personalized, location-based promotions, real-time notifications, and product recommendations can make waiting moments more engaging. A customer waiting for their turn at a bank could receive a notification about a new savings program, or a shopper at a clothing store could browse trending items while waiting for a fitting room, turning idle time into an extension of the brand experience.

Advanced queue management platforms also offer analytics that help businesses identify peak times, adjust staffing, and improve workflows. These insights ensure that every aspect of the waiting experience is optimized—not just for customers but also for operational efficiency. They also integrate with CRM systems to deliver a more personalized customer experience, such as faster service or exclusive time slots.

The future of waiting isn’t about eliminating it; it’s about rethinking it. By embracing modern tools and technology, businesses can transform wait times into opportunities to meaningfully engage, delight, and grow.

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Solutions Review’s listing of the best CRM software companies is an annual look into the solution providers in our Buyer’s Guide and Solutions Directory. Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.

A company’s interactions with its customers are a driving force behind its ever-evolving marketing and sales strategies. Many companies have turned to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to help them turn those interactions into ongoing relationships. With these solutions, marketers can automate tasks, analyze large quantities of data, and improve customer and employee experiences. Since CRM solutions cover a range of capabilities for businesses of all shapes and sizes, the marketplace continues to grow in new and unique ways.

However, finding the best CRM solution for your company isn’t always easy. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, as different products will have different pros and cons. With that in mind, Solutions Review editors updated this list of the best CRM software companies in the marketplace to consider if you’re looking for a new solution in 2025 (and beyond).

Our editors gathered this information via online materials, reports, product demonstrations, conversations with vendor representatives, and free trial examinations. Companies are listed in alphabetical order.

The Best CRM Software Companies for 2025

Act!

Description: The Act! platform provides CRM and marketing automation capabilities that include pipeline visuals and management, customer database management, pipeline management, business insights, reports, and more. The provider also has an extensive library of support resources such as software tutorials, video training, and a ticket system for in-depth issues. Act! can connect with hundreds of popular apps and software your business may already use. This product is best for small and medium-sized organizations. 

ActiveCampaign

Description: ActiveCampaign provides email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and Sales Automation solutions to clients across industries. Its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform has email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and sales automation solutions for businesses across industries. Its CRM suite has lead scoring, contact management, sales pipelines, one-to-one email automation, customer attribution, and other capabilities to help teams improve their customer experiences. Enterprise customers can also access an “expert level” team member to consult or help with the platform. 

Agile CRM

Description: Agile CRM offers an “all-in-one” CRM product suite that includes functionalities for sales, marketing, and customer service teams across the real estate, e-commerce, SaaS, and other small-to-midsize business markets. Other features cover social media, marketing automation, contact management, web engagement, sales enablement, telephony, email marketing, and more. The platform also has a Free version that allows up to 10 users. Agile CRM integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, allowing contacts and social pages to be easily transferred to benefit your marketing and sales strategies.

Apptivo

Description: Apptivo’s Customer Relationship Management solution enables its users to attract, engage, and retain more customers. It offers a highly customizable experience, allowing users to manage each aspect of CRM through a network of connected applications. Industries such as retail, real estate, manufacturing, travel, and hospitality will find value in this software, but it’s important to note that it offers modular and limited 3rd party integrations. With a comprehensive and intuitive lead conversion process and an affordable price point, Apptivo can help users focus on customer needs with traditional and effective CRM capabilities.

Bitrix24

Description: Bitrix24 is a low-cost CRM software with marketing automation, customer support, and client management features. In addition to being available in the cloud and on-premise, Bitrix24 is accessible on desktop and mobile devices. Whether your organization is looking for a multichannel, marketing-oriented solution or a heavily sales-oriented CRM, Bitrix24 provides one of the best CRM tools for smaller businesses. The vendor even offers various pricing models that depend on the number of intended users, making it viable for emerging companies.

Brevo

Description: Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, is a CRM solution suite that helps businesses develop, maintain, and retain customer relationships across email, SMS, chat, and other channels. As part of its solution suite, Brevo equips its users with marketing tools for growing email lists, designing messages, optimizing campaigns, and analyzing results. These include email marketing, SMS marketing, WhatsApp campaigns, live chat, chatbot, landing pages, marketing automation, payment management, deal pipeline, and other capabilities that empower teams to grow company revenue.

Copper

Description: Copper is a marketing and CRM solution for Google Workspaces designed to help entrepreneurs, startups, and small teams grow their businesses from a single, centralized system. The company’s CRM platform has lead management, contact management, actionable reports, visual pipelines, deal tracking, custom reports, and more. Copper can also integrate with popular tools like Google, HubSpot, MailChimp, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Slack, and others. 

Creatio

Description: Creatio is a global software company providing low-code process management and CRM platforms for companies operating in the public sector, financial services, telecommunications, advertising, manufacturing, pharma, transportation, and other industries. Its CRM solution is divided into three products: Marketing, Sales, and Service. The company also offers a suite of services for software implementation alongside support and training for its sales, marketing, and customer service users.

Freshworks

Description: Freshworks provides business software solutions designed to be ready to go right “out of the box.” For example, the company’s CRM platform, Freshsales, comes equipped with the tools businesses need to identify loyal customers, improve engagement, personalize the shopping experience, and unify customer data. The sales and marketing CRM offering can also integrate with Freshdesk, a customer support platform that will help businesses offer a holistic shopping experience. 

HubSpot

Description: HubSpot is frequently brought up in discussions on CRM integration, as most of the providers in the marketing world offer integrations with the company’s software. HubSpot is perhaps the most popular small business CRM since its core capabilities are free. Additional features, like enterprise licensing, can be purchased as an add-on to the commercially free options. HubSpot also has platforms and solutions for sales, service, content management, and operations. HubSpot’s CRM is affordable for small businesses and organizations, especially with its negligible contact and data space limits.

Insightly

Description: Insightly is a unified CRM platform designed to align sales, marketing, and project teams around a single view of their customer base. The CRM includes workflow automation, lead routing, segmentation, campaigns, reporting, and email integration services to help marketers build meaningful relationships with present and future customers. The Insightly AppConnect platform allows users to access hundreds of pre-built app connectors. Insightly works with companies across the manufacturing, financial, healthcare, consulting, sales, insurance, e-commerce, and professional services industries.

Keap

Description: Keap is a CRM and marketing automation solutions provider for growth-oriented companies. While the company focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, it does offer a solution for established, larger firms. Keap’s CRM platform can be configured to meet the needs of multiple industries, equipping them with the sales and marketing automation tools they need to grow their business. Those tools include landing pages, automated follow-ups, multichannel marketing campaigns, customizable forms, sales pipeline management, reporting, appointment scheduling, one-on-one email messaging, SMS, payment management, and more.

Maximizer

Description: Maximizer is a feature-rich CRM product highlighted by sales function capabilities alongside marketing automation, contact management, business intelligence, cloud-based data storage, deployment tools, customer service features, and a companion mobile application. Maximizer also includes features like unlimited storage and investment account management, available via a collection of different sales package add-ons. It even offers a variety of CRM solutions at other price points, making this a solid choice for various businesses. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Description: Microsoft Dynamics 365 spans multiple technology categories and offers more than traditional customer relationship management capabilities. The solution is more focused on customer support than its competitors. Dynamics 365 provides users with a complete customer view, agile support models, predictive analysis, and integrated AI functionality, and it easily integrates with other Microsoft products. With deployment options for small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses, this product is viable for almost any business, regardless of size or need. 

monday.com

Description: Monday is a cloud-based, scalable, and flexible project management software for companies of all sizes. With Monday’s CRM solution, companies can create a custom platform using ready-made templates and tailor sales pipelines, workflows, and processes to meet business needs and drive growth. The integrated sales and marketing CRM includes sales pipeline visualizations, centralized data management, mobile access, workflow automation, customer tracking, custom automations, pipeline management, custom dashboards, and a collection of integrations.

NetSuite

Description: NetSuite, a property of Oracle, specializes in cloud-based solutions, including CRM, ERP, and e-commerce. NetSuite’s cloud-based CRM updates in real-time. Its cloud-based CRM tool updates in real-time and provides standard features such as SFA, customer service management, marketing automation, and more advanced capabilities like order management, commissions, sales forecasting, and integrated e-commerce. The platform tackles the entire customer lifecycle, from lead through opportunity, sales order, fulfillment, and more. 

Nextiva

Description: Nextiva offers multiple CRM products to align with the needs of organizations in varying industries. The vendor’s sales and marketing solution portfolio features tools to tackle traditional sales and customer service challenges. Nextiva brings a service-focused solution to a market populated by sales-oriented software. The key features bolster users’ capabilities in providing quality service and support experiences to their customers. With more AI-based technology arriving in the future, Nextiva is a worthwhile contender for organizations with a customer focus.

Nimble

Description: Nimble offers various products and functionalities that integrate with Microsoft Office and Google. They provide middle-market and enterprise companies with CRM software that includes social insights into potential prospects. In addition to CRM software, Nimble is also known in the sales automation space. Social integration capabilities set Nimble apart in the market, as it collects critical information from online profiles to supplement data already within the system.

Nutshell

Description: The Nutshell CRM platform is equipped with sales automation, pipeline management, reporting, contact management, email, team collaboration, marketing features, and a collection of integrations with software like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Gmail, Office 365, Outlook, Zendesk, and more. The company’s user-friendly platform best suits small and medium-sized businesses across industries and offers an accessible monthly pricing option.

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As part of this year’s Insight Jam LIVE event, the Solutions Review editors have compiled a list of predictions for 2025 from some of the most experienced professionals across the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and broader WorkTech marketplaces.

As part of Solutions Review’s annual Insight Jam LIVE event, we called for the industry’s best and brightest to share their ERP, BPM, CRM, and Marketing Automation predictions for 2025 and beyond. The experts featured represent some of the top WorkTech solution providers with experience in these marketplaces, and each projection has been vetted for relevance and ability to add business value.

WorkTech Predictions for 2025 and Beyond

Thomas Butta, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship

Data willingly and simply provided will be key to unifying customer experiences.

“While walled gardens are nothing new, the walls keep getting higher—fortified by data deprecation and growing privacy regulations. In 2025, industry giants like Meta and Google will continue to tighten their grip on audiences, keeping more traffic on their pages while scraping content for large language models without an equitable value exchange. The result: plummeting referral traffic and soaring acquisition costs.

“Now more than ever, brands must prioritize direct customer relationships or risk being disintermediated. Data willingly and simply provided and purposefully solicited will be key to unifying experiences everywhere customers choose to interact–on the web, in apps, and everywhere in between.”

Murray Campbell, Global Product Manager (Regulatory) at AutoRek

Compliance demands drive the rise of automation  

“Regulatory pressures aren’t just tightening the screws—they’re turbocharging the case for compliance automation. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expanding its budget and workforce to unprecedented levels. As global authorities enforce increasingly complex mandates, businesses are drowning in a sea of audits, filings, and reporting requirements. The old-school, manual approach to compliance is officially obsolete.

“Regulators are increasingly favoring firms that adopt advanced technology, recognizing that automated processes provide a level of traceability and precision unattainable with manual methods. As the digital economy grows, transaction volumes surge, and regulatory demands evolve, sticking to outdated methods for critical processes becomes an inefficient and costly approach.

“In this high-stakes landscape, automation isn’t a luxury—it’s an essential component of doing business today. By automating tasks like validations and cash transfers, firms can achieve greater speed and precision in handling data-related processes. This also frees resources to focus on activities that benefit from human expertise and creative problem-solving.”

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint

DevOps Supercharges AI-First Infrastructure in 2025

“DevOps will evolve to meet the unique demands of AI-driven infrastructure, where complex ecosystems of data, machine learning models, and interconnected systems power nearly every industry. This AI ecosystem involves managing vast amounts of data, training and deploying machine learning models, and supporting scalable compute resources—all requiring specialized infrastructure. DevOps teams will expand their role, going beyond workflow automation to fully owning and optimizing these AI-first infrastructures. They’ll set best practices for managing the speed, scale, and reliability of AI applications, helping organizations harness AI efficiently and securely as it becomes central to operations.”

Edge Compute: The New Frontier in 2025

“Edge computing will emerge as the new frontier, enabling real-time data processing closer to where it’s generated—whether in autonomous vehicles, IoT devices, or remote facilities. By minimizing latency and reducing the load on centralized cloud resources, edge computing will transform industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail with faster, more reliable data-driven insights. This shift empowers applications that demand ultra-low latency, increased security, and local processing capabilities, pushing businesses toward a future where edge intelligence enhances user experiences, operational efficiency, and scalability like never before.”

Bill Buckley, the SVP of Engineering at CloudZero

Damantha Boteju, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Configit

Manufacturers Will Lean into Generative AI for Augmentation and Employee Enablement

“One of the significant business benefits of Generative AI is reducing time to market while giving employees time back to work on bigger, more creative projects. Generative AI helps accelerate business processes and reduce mundane work, enabling employees to focus on being creative and putting more effort into better human interactions and collaboration. The most competitive companies in 2025 will be those who understand the power of artificial intelligence and copilots to build on the strength of their employees.”

Daniel Joseph Barry, Vice President of Product Marketing at Configit

The Concept of the Digital Configuration Thread Gains Prominence   

“The digital thread approach is rapidly becoming the data foundation for managing both standard and configurable products. As we move into 2025, we see this concept playing an even more prominent role. That’s because a digital thread can help manufacturers by providing end-to-end insight and traceability, enabling analysis and optimization of product portfolios, and supporting digital twins. However, achieving this approach often requires manufacturers to cobble together information from multiple bills of material (BOMs) in varying formats that reside in disparate systems–typically under the purview of multiple departments. That can lead to misunderstandings, inconsistencies, control issues, and maintenance concerns, but Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) produces a ‘digital configuration thread’ that can help manufacturers manage product configurations better.”

Manufacturers Will Look to Configuration to Help with Workforce Challenges

“Demands on manufacturers have never been higher, but U.S. manufacturers are struggling with a workforce gap. As seasoned workers hit retirement age, manufacturers will need to ensure they can capture the institutional knowledge of these employees in a more efficient way. That means moving away from a document- and experience-driven process to capture information from individual contributors. A configuration lifecycle management approach is one approach to doing this, laying the foundation for better collaboration and innovation by centralizing product configuration information so it can be shared among multiple departments. This capability lessens the sting of retiring pros and the fear of losing a company’s ‘brain trust.'”

Henrik Hulgaard, Vice President of Product Management at Configit

Configurability Will Become a Bigger Priority 

“As we saw in a recent survey of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) professionals conducted by CIMdata, configurability has become a bigger priority, and we anticipate that trend will continue in 2025. This will drive the need for new ways to support customization, as traditional processes and tools won’t suffice. Many manufacturers still try to manage configurable products and product variants as if they were standard products, but managing configurable products requires a different approach. This leads to the next prediction.”

The Adoption of Modularity Will Rise 

“We’ll see an increase in modularity due to the expanded demand for customization and increased regulations and compliance mandates. For instance, sustainability regulations that require reuse and recyclability, such as those we see in the U.S. and EU, are easier to meet with a modular approach. Many early adopters have already implemented a modular approach to their products, and we’ll see more adoption in the new year, as modularity benefits manufacturers by reducing time, effort, and costs. It enables them to meet customization demands more cost-effectively by reusing modules (collections of features or pre-assembled parts) rather than custom engineering.

“Adopting modularization can be demanding, as it requires process changes, but with the combined compelling events of regulations and competition, manufacturers can justify the investment and reap the benefits. Forward-thinking manufacturers have already recognized this and are adopting new approaches centered on modularity and transitioning from engineer-to-order (ETO) to more customize-to-order (CTO) approaches that better meet their customers’ needs and enable faster response and delivery of solutions with minimal impact on engineering resources.”

Rahul Pradhan, Vice President of Product and Strategy at Couchbase

Agentic AI Poised to Power Next Wave of AI Innovation in 2025

“In 2025, the trajectory of AI will be shaped by the rise of agentic AI—proactive, intelligent agents that go beyond basic chatbots in an evolution promising a profound transformation for both consumer and enterprise landscapes, accelerating the world into a new era of AI capabilities. With capabilities such as understanding context, setting goals, and adapting actions, agentic AI can complete tasks previously thought impossible by AI.

“For this to be made possible, agentic systems require a compound AI system using multiple models that are moved closer to data sources within security parameters. The systems also need to handle both structured and unstructured data at low latency—all in real-time — to make meaningful, context-aware decisions on the fly. This requires seamless integrations across unstructured data processing, vector databases, and transactional systems for efficient storage and retrieval of diverse data types.

“The companies that will excel in providing these robust integrations and infrastructures will be uniquely positioned to drive the next wave of innovation and value in the AI sector.”

Edge AI Agents: Autonomous Decision-Makers

“As the maturity of Agentic AI advances, edge devices will start to adopt agents that can act autonomously based on real-time data. Edge AI agents, powered by integrated databases, will be able to make decisions in milliseconds, bypassing the need for centralized processing. These autonomous agents will perform tasks like controlling robotic arms in manufacturing, adjusting energy consumption in smart grids, and ensuring patient safety in healthcare facilities. The combination of AI models, local data processing, and autonomous agents will make edge devices intelligent participants in broader ecosystems.”

Steve Rotter, Chief Marketing Officer at DeepL

AI will accelerate hyper-personalized, more consistent marketing.

“We live in a hyper-personalized world—custom coffee, made-to-order clothing, and on-demand news feeds. Brands are even now tailoring their marketing messages and language to every customer in their preferred language, style, and tone. Along with personalization, consistency of language across all streams is central to successful marketing. Research shows that it boosts revenue by 20 percent or more.

“However, achieving this consistency across borders and languages is tough, requiring not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation to ensure that messages resonate the right way in different markets. If advertisers and marketers don’t get this right, they’ll open themselves up to misunderstandings, wasted resources, and missed growth opportunities. 2025 will be an exciting year for the marketing world as we start seeing a better understanding of how AI can strengthen customer relationships and help businesses’ bottom lines.”

Jim Palmer, the Chief AI Officer at Dialpad

The AI trust divide will reshape market dynamics in 2025. 

“Organizations that address customer concerns and ensure human oversight to prioritize transparency and ethical governance will gain a competitive edge. Companies that proactively address customer concerns and maintain human oversight will excel in customer retention and navigate regulated markets more effectively than those rushing to market without proper ethics. As consumer awareness grows and regulatory frameworks evolve, the market will increasingly reward businesses that demonstrate responsible AI practices while fostering innovation, leading to a more mature competitive landscape.”

Businesses will grow increasingly skeptical of AI offerings. 

“We’ll see a shift towards industry-specific AI tools as businesses grow weary of generic solutions that fail to deliver on their promises. This skepticism will be fueled by the proliferation of rushed AI products that create more challenges than they solve, leading to stalled adoption and investment among wary buyers.”

The human element of customer service will be redefined.

“As AI handles routine inquiries and administrative tasks, customer service roles will evolve to focus on complex problem-solving and relationship building. This shift will attract and retain more skilled professionals who can dedicate time to nuanced customer needs, leading to improved job satisfaction and career advancement opportunities. Organizations that successfully blend AI efficiency with meaningful human interactions will see higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, while those maintaining traditional high-volume, low-value service models will lag behind.”

Alan Samuels, the Vice President of Data and Product at Encompass Corporation

In 2025, AI Will Move Beyond The Hype and into Practical Application

“As artificial intelligence (AI) matures, 2025 marks a pivotal shift in how the financial industry leverages its potential. Gone are the days of embracing AI for its novelty. In the coming year, financial organizations will focus on pragmatism, problem-solving, and creating measurable value.”

• Solutions-focused AI: Financial firms will focus on scalable solutions that deliver clear, measurable outcomes. AI applications are now subject to rigorous scrutiny regarding their origins, training data, and compliance with security standards.
• Accelerating Digital Transformation: Advances in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision are enabling AI to process non-digital information, bridging the gap for businesses reliant on legacy systems.
• The Arms Race in Financial Crime: AI is transforming how institutions detect and prevent fraud, leveraging its ability to uncover patterns and connections hidden in vast datasets while staying ahead in an arms race against increasingly sophisticated bad actors.
• Rethinking Product Development: AI serves as a “co-pilot” for developers, assisting in coding and accelerating the translation of vision into actionable requirements. AI-powered tools are reshaping how financial firms deliver customer experiences, blending efficiency with personalization to meet evolving demands.
• Enhancing CX: AI-powered tools are reshaping how financial firms deliver customer experiences, blending efficiency with personalization to meet evolving demands.
• Corporate Digital Identity (CDI): CDI leverages multiple advanced technologies, including AI, security frameworks, and robotic process automation (RPA), by pulling information from both public and private domains, ensuring it adheres to regulatory requirements, such as documenting sources and demonstrating the provenance of data.

Alexandros Siskos, the SVP of Customer Success and Marketplace Strategy at Everseen

More than Half of Retailers Will Invest in AI Platform Technology.

“As retailers recognize the value of unified AI solutions over piecemeal approaches, we predict that over half of them will adopt AI platform technology to support a growing range of business applications. This platform approach will enable retailers to apply AI-driven insights across business functions such as loss prevention, inventory management, and customer experience. With the tech industry increasingly focused on this market, retailers are well-positioned to integrate foundational AI with tailored applications.”

Casey Ciniello, Reveal and Slingshot Senior Product Manager, Infragistics

Implementing AI Will be a Top Priority in 2025

“By 2025, generative AI will become more integrated into technology, including content creation, software development, and automated decision-making. The shift towards AI will be a top priority and present transformative challenges in 2025, including workforce concerns about job security and resistance among employees hesitant to embrace AI-driven interactions. Traditional mentoring and learning pathways could be disrupted, resulting in limited development opportunities for junior staff and leaving a critical gap in skill-building and career growth.

“To address these challenges, we must adopt a proactive approach to collaboration between human employees and AI tools, emphasizing the unique skills that humans bring to the table, such as creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. By fostering an environment where employees view AI as a partner rather than a replacement, organizations can alleviate fears and enhance morale.”

JJ McGuigan, App Builder Product Manager at Infragistics

“Industries like healthcare and finance, where compliance with strict regulatory standards is critical, often face extended development timelines due to the rigorous testing required. However, the growing adoption of low-code tools is poised to revolutionize the time needed to adhere to these standards. Low-code platforms not only accelerate app development but also ensure that applications are built in alignment with legal and regulatory requirements. By integrating industry best practices into the development process, low-code solutions will streamline compliance, enabling faster delivery of secure, compliant apps without sacrificing quality or oversight.”

Security-related attacks on AI agents will soon emerge as a critical threat.

“Technology leaders will need “Guardian Agents” to autonomously monitor, manage, and contain AI actions as they work to establish standards for AI oversight. With enterprise interest in AI agents intensifying, next-generation GenAI agents are rapidly reshaping strategic planning for product leaders. Guardian Agents will bring a holistic approach to AI security, integrating compliance assurance, ethics, data filtering, log analysis, and advanced observability. As we move through 2025, the number of product releases deploying multiple agents will rise, supporting increasingly sophisticated use cases. Guardrails, security filters, and human oversight alone won’t be enough to guarantee the safe and appropriate use of autonomous agents.”

Daniel Lereya, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com

Productization Fuels AI Business Transformation in 2025

“AI has moved beyond the hype and is now a fundamental force transforming business operations. As we move into 2025, the primary challenge won’t be the technology but adopting and integrating AI into existing workflows. Companies must focus on how AI can be embedded directly into platforms, including new and existing processes while extracting real and material business value to enhance and scale operations.

“For AI to truly drive value, it must be accessible, predictable, and trustworthy—solutions that provide clear ROI while seamlessly aligning with how companies already work. Businesses will prioritize AI tools that grow with them and can tackle a wide range of issues, from automating routine processes to solving complex problems across areas like customer service, supply chain optimization, and data analysis—all with minimal disruption and cost.

“Ultimately, success in 2025 will hinge on adopting AI and ensuring its implementation is smooth, scalable, and impactful within existing infrastructures. This will unlock new business opportunities, accelerate growth, and encourage companies to build a unique competitive edge in an increasingly AI-driven world.”

Enterprise Work Management: The Key to Scaling Success

“In 2025 and beyond, enterprise work management will be a cornerstone of business success as companies realize that seamless execution at scale is essential for growth. With hybrid teams spread across offices and remote locations, orchestrating workflows across departments, time zones, and geographies is no longer optional—it’s vital. Businesses that master this alignment will drive innovation and agility and stay ahead in an increasingly digital-first world.”

Unified Platforms Are the Future of Enterprise Tech

“Platforms will reign supreme as businesses consolidate their tech stacks into unified systems for greater efficiency and strategic advantage. With all company data in one place, decision-making becomes faster and smarter, unlocking insights that fuel growth. Companies looking to achieve a complete AI transformation will find it more effective to implement an AI platform as an integrated platform essential for unlocking its full potential across all aspects of the business. In a data-driven world, a holistic platform isn’t just nice; it will be a must-have for organizations looking to establish a unique competitive edge.”

Amol Dalvi, the VP of Product of Nerdio

Demand for Cost Efficiency and Resiliency in VDI and DaaS 

“Looking into 2025, we’ll see an increase in demand for cost efficiency coupled with robust business continuity and resiliency in virtual desktop solutions. These themes are echoed consistently by our customers who are asking questions like, ‘How do I ensure my AVD desktops remain accessible at all times?’ and ‘How can I meet stringent continuity requirements?’ The shift to cloud VDI solutions has brought many benefits, yet with the growing focus on uninterrupted access, we expect to see an evolving approach to meet both budget and reliability needs.”

Resurgence of On-Premises VDI Solutions 

“I anticipate a resurgence of on-premises VDI solutions in 2025. Azure Stack HCI could offer a VDI option for organizations that require specific data residency or regulatory control, face bandwidth challenges, or may not be fully comfortable relying solely on the public cloud. This trend would be especially significant for highly regulated sectors like healthcare, financial services, and federal government agencies, where tight control over data location and access can be critical. We’re even seeing an uptick in interest for environments where a completely disconnected setup—think submarine-level isolation from the internet—is a real business requirement.”

Stabilization of AVD as a Cloud VDI Leader 

“In the cloud arena, AVD continues to stabilize as a technology, which may encourage broader adoption by businesses that have been slower to make the shift. The improved reliability and usability of AVD, along with the integration of Microsoft 365 into the DaaS landscape, adds interesting new layers of choice. Organizations will need to weigh the flexibility and maturity of AVD against the growing adoption of Windows 365 to determine the best fit for their needs.”

Balancing AVD’s Versatility with Windows 365 Integration 

“As we look ahead, it will be fascinating to see how the market balances these options—whether enterprises lean more into the maturity and flexibility of AVD or focus on the pre-packaged option of Windows 365 for their evolving workforce needs. The decision will hinge on each organization’s unique needs for both flexibility and operational continuity.”

Jonathan Rhyne, CEO and co-founder of Nutrient

“As we embark on the journey of understanding AI’s impact on productivity, particularly in how we create, interact with, and experience documents, we find ourselves at an exciting crossroads. Currently, generative AI is revolutionizing content creation, enabling us to produce new material with unprecedented ease. Additionally, AI’s capability to access and summarize text from images has transformed our interactions with documents, making them more intuitive than ever.

“Looking ahead, I anticipate a significant evolution in how we experience these documents. One of AI’s groundbreaking advancements is its ability to establish a direct interface between humans and computers. While the popularity of natural language chatbots is currently capturing attention, they serve as a preliminary step in demonstrating the potential of transformer models.

“In the coming year, we can expect this new human-computer interface to facilitate real-time personalization of document content. This means that interactions will become dynamic, tailored to individual preferences and past experiences, all while leveraging the most current information available. Over time, the conveniences brought by AI will become so integrated into our daily lives that they will be taken for granted, much like our constant connectivity to the internet today.”

Steve Fenton, Principle DevEx Researcher at Octopus Deploy

Platform Engineering will be thinner.

“Platform engineering has become a path towards DevOps efficiency and developer productivity. In 2025, organizations will realize they can achieve the goals of platform engineering with fewer lines of bespoke code. Instead of trying to build a grand unifying platform, existing tools will provide solutions that reduce fragmentation, apply standards, and integrate security into software delivery.”

Continuous delivery is dead… Long live continuous delivery!

“As organizations shift to platform-as-a-service, Kubernetes, and serverless offerings, they often lose good practices along the way. The solid continuous delivery pipelines they created for traditional self-hosted and IaaS environments had solid practices that should be transferred to new environments.”

Paul Laudanski, Director of Security Research at Onapsis

Cloud migration delays will trigger security emergencies

“As organizations face pressure to migrate their business-critical data to the cloud, many are still dragging their feet. Once migration becomes urgent, especially as we approach deadlines such as SAP’s 2027 cutoff to move to S/4HANA, the rush to transition will lead to mistakes such as leaving remaining vulnerabilities in the code or data you are bringing over. These mistakes could lead to costly delays or re-dos. Organizations still on legacy systems need to modernize their applications immediately to survive in the digital world that is already surpassing them. In 2025, we must prioritize addressing this migration before the risk compounds by way of proper cross-functional planning and execution.”

Lalitha Rajagopalan, co-founder of ORO Labs

Integrating GenAI and no-code solutions into procurement processes will be integral to remaining agile in the face of global changes.

“With natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and economic shifts on the rise, traditional, pre-built procurement solutions can no longer adapt fast enough to avoid disruptions. GenAI-powered procurement orchestration breaks free from ‘hard-coded’ limitations, allowing companies to dynamically respond as situations evolve. This will be key to eliminating complex systems, improving visibility, and unlocking hyper agility, inherently enabling teams to react faster to potential disruptions, keeping operations not only on track but ahead in an unpredictable world.”

GenAI investments will shift from generic, broad use cases to more specialized, strategic applications.

“As GenAI technologies mature, companies will prioritize tools with clear ROI and targeted use cases. Procurement is especially ripe for transformation, given its exposure to frequent disruptions from global instability and complex third-party networks. By implementing GenAI in this space, companies can replace cumbersome systems with streamlined solutions that enhance visibility, adaptability, and resilience, making it a clear area where specialized GenAI investment can drive tangible results.”

Itamar Golan, Co-Founder and CEO at Prompt Security

The Future of Work with AI

“Contrary to widespread concerns, I don’t expect AI to eliminate jobs in 2025. Instead, it will serve as a powerful tool to enhance human capabilities. Agentic AI systems will work alongside humans, such as in customer service, sales outreach, marketing content creation, software development, and healthcare applications, among others. This means that very soon, 30 percent of our tedious and repetitive tasks will be automated, giving us more time to focus on creative, innovative, and interesting pursuits.

“I believe we will also see a significant shift as the multimodality of AI becomes more mainstream (video, audio, etc.), as opposed to the majority of its use, which has been text-based. This creates new opportunities for human-AI collaboration.”

Organizational AI Adoption

“The democratization of LLM access, driven by ever-decreasing prices, is enabling broader adoption across organizations. Additionally, specialized AI solutions will increasingly be moving away from OpenAI’s dominance, with alternatives like Claude gaining traction in specific domains such as coding, which is something we’re already starting to see.”

Agentic AI

“AI chatbots use generative AI to provide responses based on a single interaction. A person makes a query, and the chatbot uses natural language processing to reply. In my opinion, the next frontier of artificial intelligence will be agentic AI, which employs sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. It is poised to enhance productivity and operations across various industries.

“Agentic AI systems process vast amounts of data from multiple sources to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies, and execute tasks such as supply chain optimization, cybersecurity vulnerability analysis, and assisting doctors with time-consuming tasks. I believe that by 2025, we will see a significant increase in resources shifting from single-interaction procedures with LLMs to this multi-step approach of agentic AI, which will gradually solve complex problems for us autonomously.”

Nitesh Bansal, CEO and Managing Director of R Systems

Organizations Must Take A Practical Approach to Generative AI Usage

“It’s no secret that generative AI has already had a significant impact on digital product engineering. It has fundamentally changed the way companies optimize the design and functionality of their products–everything from accelerating ideation and prototyping to user experience and product performance.

“In 2025, we will see more of this, but we will also see organizations take a more practical approach to how they leverage AI. AI has had a lot of hype–and that will continue–but more and more tech leaders will place a higher emphasis on ensuring measurable ROI–especially what can be achieved in the same fiscal year or under 12 months. For example, if an organization requires complex coding to enhance a new product, using AI to automate routine development tasks can free up needed time and gain an immediate benefit.”

There Will Be Continued Innovation Challenges In Digital Product Engineering if Organizations Don’t Embrace Upskilling and Outsourcing

“Innovation in digital product engineering will continue to flourish, but it will not come without challenges. On the technical side, a growing reliance on data, AI, and the cloud will require robust security measures and compliance with industry, state, and federal regulations. Additionally, ensuring AI-driven products are fair, transparent, and free from harmful biases will require ongoing vigilance and mitigation strategies.

“In the face of these challenges, it will be more important than ever to engage with those with deep technology expertise and know-how. However, finding and retaining professionals with the right mix of AI, data science, and product engineering skills will continue to be a challenge in itself.

“In 2025, we will see an increased focus on upskilling and outsourcing in an attempt to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology landscape. Internal teams will become keepers of industry and company expertise, engaging with external resources that can help them choose and leverage the right emerging technologies while also bringing outside thinking and experience to problem-solving.”

Pieter Danhieux, co-founder and CEO of Secure Code Warrior

Rewriting the AI Equation: Not AI Instead of Developer, but AI + Developer

“As companies are prompted to take drastic cost-cutting measures in 2025, it would be to no one’s surprise that developers are replaced with AI tooling. But as was the situation when Generative AI first made its debut, and now, with years of updates and more to come, it is still not a safe, autonomous productivity driver, especially when creating code. AI is a highly disruptive technology with many amazing applications and use cases, but it is not a sufficient replacement for skilled human developers. I agree with Forrester’s prediction that this shift towards AI/human replacement in 2025 is likely to fail, especially in the long term. I think the combination of AI + developer is more likely to achieve this than AI alone.”

Bulent Cinarkaya, GM of Field Service Management at ServiceNow

“Over the past year and a half, field service organizations have been running a lot of GenAI pilot programs. Now, they’re working out whether to build solutions in-house, buy off-the-shelf options, or go with a mix of both. Next year, we’ll likely see a big increase in GenAI rollouts, with the technology expanding beyond just text-based tools. We’re talking about smarter, multi-turn conversations and new image and video intelligence features that can handle more advanced tasks. These developments will help companies operate more efficiently and open up fresh ways to improve service and engage customers.”

Dorit Levy-Zilbershot, VP of AI and Innovation at ServiceNow

“Over the next year, we will witness the evolution of enterprise AI agents as they become increasingly sophisticated in their reasoning and comprehension capabilities. Emerging use cases will transform the way businesses leverage these agents, and the nature of human interaction with them will evolve as they take on more complex tasks and decision-making roles. Watch for the rise of AI-powered ‘supervisors’ that will have the ability to move past simply automating tasks to truly orchestrating the interaction of all AI agents throughout an entire organization. This will make it exponentially easier for humans to administrate teams of AI agents across their entire business.

“By the end of 2025, AI agents will cross the chasm from tools that require more hands-on supervision to fully autonomous systems. Expect to see AI agents independently automating complex, multi-step processes without a human in the loop. This will undoubtedly transform how executives view AI adoption, positioning it as a powerful engine for unprecedented growth and innovation.”

Heather Jerrehian, VP of Product Management – Employee Workflows at ServiceNow

“To build an AI-capable workforce, organizations need visibility into the day-to-day tasks people perform and a plan for how to free up that time for more impactful work. Task intelligence will be the new frontier in 2025, enabling AI-driven automation and workforce agility so leaders can make informed decisions about upskilling, reskilling, and redeploying talent.

“In 2025, organizations will embrace autonomous agents, pairing humans and AI agents to streamline operations while cultivating new skill pathways for the workforce. This enables humans and machines to co-create the future of work—harnessing what each does best in a seamless partnership.”

Terence Chesire, VP of Product Management – Customer and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow

“In customer service, the ongoing transition from on-premise to the cloud for contact center will continue to accelerate–driven by the need to adopt AI quickly. This may come as a surprise to many. While most other software stacks have already moved to the cloud, the contact center has remained on-prem. The implication of this shift is a greater need to integrate cloud contact center systems with cloud-based CRM to both orchestrate interactions and the work that needs to happen during and after the call.”

Mark Mader, President and CEO at Smartsheet

Generative AI (GenAI) is ushering in a renaissance age for the generalist.

“Organizations have spent a disproportionate amount of capital hiring hyper-specialized talent with deep technical knowledge for years. Now, with the democratization of GenAI, the value offered by hiring ‘capable generalists’ is on the rise. People who articulately frame their thoughts, pose well-formed questions (prompts), and exercise AI tools to their advantage stand to benefit greatly.

“The demand for specialized AI talent—model developers, AI ops talent, and engineers to build and maintain infrastructure—will persist in 2025. However, we will also see the demand for non-technical talent shift to a more balanced state. Organizations will place as much worth on employees with the skills to extract value from platforms as those who build them.”

Future of Work 

“Over the past year, many of us have started experimenting with GenAI to work smarter and faster, raising questions about how this new technology will impact knowledge workers’ roles. In the coming year, organizations will apply GenAI to reduce and even replace repetitive tasks. This will allow knowledge workers to shift their focus, freeing their time to work on the aspects of their roles that are more strategic and creative. As a result, we’ll start to see more innovation. Businesses will also be expected to move faster and deliver more for their customers. Those who adopt GenAI now will have a competitive edge as these expectations shift.”

In 2025, AI will start to become part of the everyday fabric of our work.

“This year, an unbelievable amount of software came online that enables people to take advantage of AI in the context of their daily work. In 2025, AI will become part of the everyday fabric of work. Adoption will increase dramatically. More people will experience AI within the software they currently use. This removes the friction of switching to another app and staring at a blank prompt window. People will know where to start, and when they see results generated, they’ll usually have a better sense of whether the result is accurate.”

Greg Benson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco and Chief Scientist at SnapLogic

Agents will Flourish with Human Oversight

“Agents have the potential to automate the grunt work of many human activities in the enterprise. However, the near-term success of Agents will depend on the harmonious interaction between autonomous processing and human approval of critical, consequential decisions. In this way, Agents are an accelerator to human workflows, but the human still has the final say. Future Agent systems will seamlessly incorporate a human in the loop.”

Increased Focus on Copyright and Data Provenance

“As AI-generated content proliferates, questions about copyright infringement and data lineage will intensify. The industry will see a push toward ‘provenance-aware’ AI models that provide transparency about the sources of their training data. Legal and regulatory developments in this area will be closely monitored and could redefine how AI models are trained and deployed.”

Nitin Singhal, VP of Engineering (Data, AI, and Integrations) at SnapLogic

AI Agents Will Empower Data Engineers To Deliver More Value

“In 2025, enterprise AI agents will fundamentally transform workplace operations, not just by automating repetitive tasks but by reimagining the way teams collaborate, innovate, and deliver value. Far beyond assisting humans, AI agents will optimize decision-making, reduce operational overhead, and empower employees to focus on creativity and strategic initiatives. This evolution will redefine roles like data engineers and software developers, transitioning their work from repetitive processes to managing AI systems, shaping data ecosystems, and unlocking new avenues of value.”

The Real Work Behind Building Responsible AI Systems Will Come to Light in 2025

“The adoption of generative AI will necessitate robust data integration and validation technologies. Organizations will prioritize data lineage, cataloging, and context-sensitive processing to reduce risks like hallucinations in AI outputs. Regulatory compliance frameworks around data privacy, security, and transparency will evolve, and we will see brand new AI regulations driven by global attention to responsible AI usage.”

Charles Ruffino, Fellow, Cloud Architecture at SoftIron

IT talent shortage will force radical workforce reimagination.

“The IT talent landscape is about to experience a tectonic shift that makes previous skill shortages look like a gentle tremor. The quantum of offshore talent is contracting faster than a startup’s runway during a funding drought, forcing organizations into a high-stakes game of technological musical chairs. Onshore talent acquisition will become a bloodsport, with compensation packages climbing like hyperscaler stock prices and the true cost of technical expertise revealing itself in brutal economic clarity.

“This talent crunch isn’t just a staffing problem—it’s an existential forcing function for IT infrastructure reimagination. While AI won’t magically replace human expertise overnight, it will accelerate a Darwinian evolution in how technical teams are structured, skills are developed, and complex systems are conceived. Organizations will be compelled to architect more resilient, self-documenting, and intrinsically manageable infrastructure, transforming a potential crisis into a strategic inflection point for technological innovation. The silver lining? Those who adapt fastest will emerge not just surviving but fundamentally redesigning the future of enterprise technology.”

J-M Erlendson, Global Evangelist at Software AG

Shadow AI is here to stay

“Even as companies push towards developing proprietary AI models, shadow AI will remain pervasive. People tend to favor their own way of doing things, so it’s incumbent on business leaders to evolve in how they address unsanctioned AI use. Blanket bans may have the unintended effect of discouraging innovation, while a failure to lay out policies will bring security and compliance risks. The focus from a governance standpoint should be to make sure company tools are the best available options, as well as educate workers about the inherent risks of shadow AI.”

AI-powered predictive analytics will evolve, driving timely decision-making for businesses.

“Right now, AI’s capabilities in predictive analytics are still mediocre, with machine learning falling short of delivering the deep insights businesses need. While AI today mainly identifies trends, significant advancements will begin to emerge in 2025 and beyond. Over the coming years, AI will continue to evolve to provide more accurate, preemptive decision-making support, empowering organizations to act on business practices proactively and in real-time rather than giving counsel based on older context.”

Aurélien Caye, Solution Specialist at Sprinklr

The Rise of AI-Powered Customer Support

“In 2025, traditional chatbot experiences will fall short as customer expectations evolve. Businesses will increasingly adopt autonomous, AI-powered agents capable of delivering more adaptable, responsive, and personalized support. Generative AI, especially through conversational AI copilots, will enhance both customer and agent interactions by enabling faster, more insightful responses that feel human. While this shift opens vast opportunities, it also brings challenges in responsible AI implementation. As organizations scale up AI adoption, they’ll need to establish guardrails, ensure transparency, and focus on regulatory compliance. Ethical considerations and transparency in AI decision-making will be essential to building customer trust.”

Optimizing AI Efficiency and ROI in 2025

“As organizations move beyond the initial generative AI hype, 2025 will see a focus on optimizing AI model efficiency. Companies will prioritize ‘smaller LLMs’ or open-source, in-house models to improve ROI and manage costs effectively. Multi-modal capabilities in AI will gain traction, allowing systems to interpret diverse content formats and provide more comprehensive support. Success will come from blending AI’s capabilities with human input to create meaningful customer experiences, ensuring that AI-driven transformations remain both sustainable and valuable.”

Ryan Tierney, SVP of Product Management at TrueCommerce

“As we move into 2025, many of the challenges supply chain leaders face today are likely to persist. While the obstacles themselves might not change dramatically, we can expect businesses to sharpen their focus in key areas, particularly around automation. Streamlining supply chain processes will continue to be a priority as companies look for ways to operate faster, more efficiently, and with fewer resources. Another area that will remain critical is data analytics. Supply chains are made up of complex, disparate systems, and getting smarter with data will be key to making informed decisions. Leaders will increasingly rely on internal intelligence to drive operational improvements.”

Claus Jepsen, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Unit4

Out With Generative AI, In With Automation

“In 2025, IT leaders will pull back from applying generative AI to enterprise use cases amid growing data privacy and intellectual property concerns. While generative AI will fail to gain immediate traction, I expect its human-like quality and prevalence in public discourse will warm more enterprises up to the use of automation. Greater understanding and adoption of automation will transform the user experience for enterprise software. We’ll see the era of ‘self-driving ERP, where more intuitive and conversational software enables users to have less and less direct interaction with the user interface.”

Chris Wysopal, the Chief Security Evangelist and Founder of Veracode

Development and Security Teams Will Redirect Their Secure Coding Training Budget Toward Auto-Remediation

“Developers will learn less about secure coding because they’ll rely more on generative AI to remediate flaws automatically. This progression is analogous to the task of calling someone on the phone. While a few decades ago, we all needed to remember someone’s number to reach them, today, all we need to do is tap a contact on our phone. For developers, the equivalent will be to produce secure code without learning how to code securely from scratch. Instead, they will adopt processes to find, test, and fix vulnerabilities automatically, meaning it won’t be as important to know about secure coding—or even to know if generative AI has learned how to write secure code.”

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