It is the silver jubilee year. The millennials are the bygones. Gen Zee is up close and present. The Alphas are the new kids on the block. Last year for the world was an enigma. Almost three years post- COVID the hope of getting back to business as usual quickly disappeared.
Businesses giant and small went through shock waves. Countries big and small went through political upheavals. Corporate scandals leaked and stunned the world. Paris hosted the Olympics that were both praised and cut to pieces. Almost 60 countries went through the election cycle with a majority rejecting the incumbent governments. US voters brought back Donald Trump as the American economy failed to emerge from a decline. Technology raced on. Businesses played the catching up game.
Most organizations were in search of the elusive stability. Leaders were found struggling to balance stock values with human values. There were scams. There were scandals. There were wars. There were bombings. There were boycotts. In this over informed world, the speed and spread of news does not allow for absorption and reflection time.
This makes decision-making a nightmare. Too many times the speed of stress seeks comfort in doing the easiest. Layoff people, pass the pressure all the way down, cut down budgets and close down units. That has resulted in adding to the uncertainty already prevailing all around. The good news is that 2025 is going to see some familiar patterns. The bad news is that 2025 is going to see some familiar patterns. Let us look at the 4 main business areas that in 2025 will weave new patterns:
- From AI novelty to AI necessity— Artificial Intelligence is no longer going to be a good to know area, it is a must have necessity in 2025. A report by Wharton School of Business based on interviews with more than 800 business leaders says that weekly usage of Gen AI nearly doubled in the last year from 37% in 2023 to 72% in 2024.
The fear of AI overtaking human intelligence will be a bit premature in 2025. What AI is going to do is to help human intelligence become more creative. How? It is going to free the human brain from the mundane and boring but time consuming tasks of collating, categorizing, sifting, mining data analytics. The freed up time can be used to think more feely, create more alternatives etc.
For example, the legal departments spends hours on contracts that have to be read, whetted and redone repetitively. By using LLM, i.e., large language models this can be done in minutes allowing the legal brains to come up with ways and methods of reducing errors, creating more enabling clauses, etc. This also ensures that no drastic labour cuts are made.
In customer service, AI sponsored chat agents will now be answering calls and doing the FAQ stuff. If it is boring, it is frequent and repetitive, hire an AI agent. In pharmaceutical industry the long, overdrawn process of drug research and development is going to be greatly benefitting in document processing and regulatory processing, etc. Security and code reviewing is the biggest beneficiaries both as industries and functions.
- From KYC to PYC-KYC— i.e., from knowing your customer to personalizing your customer (PYC). The knowing part is relatively easier due to the data analytics available in social media. The race is of getting into being able to understand every thought and want of the customer.
This means going beyond basic personalization to hyper-personalization. AI through its light speed learning capability will not only tell what the customer wants right now but what they are expecting at every point of their customer experience journey in the future as well.
Hyper-personalization leverages AI to collect many different data points across the entire customer journey, like browsing history, digital behaviour, and other interactions, and creates offers to customers in the form of tailored content and solutions. Geoffrey Ryskamp, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at Medallia, says imagine a customer gets delayed due to flights issue.
The hotel then knows the type of snack the customer will want at 2am at night, the extra comfort pillows, the leg massager facility and so on to turn an unpleasant, tired, fed-up customer experience to a truly cared for experience.
- From EE, i.e., Employee Engagement to Employee Experience (EE)- 2025 will be facing the aftermath of the HR quake. An all-time disengagement spike in employees, well being crisis, leadership deficit have erupted to force companies to rethink HR approach.
The mantra of employee engagement needs to be more detailed and more penetrative. That is why the employee experience journey will become more important in 2025. Employees want more job enrichment, flexibility and mental well being. AI can be used to enable that.
AI isn’t just about replacing repetitive tasks anymore; it is about elevating how we work. Imagine this: you’re swamped with emails after a long weekend. Instead of slogging through your inbox, an AI assistant organizes your messages, prioritizes responses, and even drafts replies for you.
This will free the employee time to do more enriching and innovating work. For flexibility the hybrid model has to become more tailored to the employee requirements. All companies need to support mental health that is a consequence of stress, burnout and discontent in 2025. Microsoft has already given employees the facility of professional therapy, coaching and counselling.
- From Financial Management (FM) to Financial Imagineering (FI)— Finance will have to be much more than just number crunching and cost cutting in 2025. With so much volatility in the financial markets and such uncertainty in the business markets Finance will have to do more than just looking at trends and create forecasts based on the past.
They have to sift not just below the numbers but beyond them and AI-based tools can really help. Risk is all around. But how to imagine, design and encourage calculated risks is the responsibility of the CFO and his team too. Due to increasing complexity and volatility in the global business environment, risk management is a top priority for finance departments.
Whether it is market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, or cyber risk, being able to navigate these complexities and safeguard the organization’s financial health is the CFO’s job, but not with the risk-averse approach but with the risk proactive approach.
2025 can be more of the same. 2025 can be more of a change. 2025 can be more of a pain. 2025 can be more of a break. A breakback or a breakthrough. That is a choice every eye that can imagine and every mind that can create can choose.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
The writer is a columnist, consultant, coach, and an analyst and can be reached at [email protected]
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