My 2025 Predictions
Today I’m recording the first of my annual radio chats making predictions for 2025. So it’s time that I review last year’s predictions as well. The problem is, I don’t seem to have written them down!
I was still on my blogging hiatus last year and so the only record I have is my radio interview with John Pienaar on Times Radio - or rather my recollection of it. The one prediction I do remember from that, is that 2024 would be the year of the android, something I wrote about here.
Having already written a column about this, I won’t say much other than that I’m giving myself a full 10/10 for this one. Androids have totally broken through in 2024. Tesla, Kepler, Boston, Figure, plus a load more Chinese companies are bringing more and more humanoid robots to market, and new hardware such as Nvidia’s Jetson Thor platform will only accelerate their development in 2025. They’re being deployed - albeit at small scale - in real world trials.
So what else can we expect in the year ahead? Honestly, it’s been hard to identify trends that stand out quite as vividly as the android in 2025. The global economy is likely to face some pretty stiff headwinds, with China still struggling and the US pursuing protectionism. Political upheaval continues across Europe, which won’t help. And ends to the troubles in the Middle East and Ukraine look pretty distant. In short, it remains a very volatile environment.
Inject into that rapid changes in technology and the usual maelstrom of culture shift in a hyperconnected world and it can be hard to pick out broad trends that people can recognise and latch on to. Certainly it’s much easier doing this for narrow industry sectors - the way I usually work.
But there are a few things that have popped up in my analysis that I think might be interesting more broadly.
The return of the small car
Modern cars are massive. The default silhouette these days is the SUV. But I have a suspicion this might be about to change. The Renault 5, Dacia Spring, and other small electric city cars like the BYD Seagull all buck the trend for ‘bigger is better’. And they’ve all been well-received.
People are finding partners and having kids later, so there are long periods of early life where you don’t need a big car. And with us all living longer, later life might also be better suited to something small, nippy and affordable. We don’t all need SUVs and we don’t all want them either.
We take learning seriously
Every single leader I’ve spoken to in 2024 has told me the same thing: the number one issue at the top of their list is recruitment and retention. Finding people with the right skills and attitude, and keeping them. Yet most would admit they don’t invest enough in training and development. Eventually this has to change.
If Labour sticks to the last government’s policy on education funding, from the next academic year student loans change radically. You will be able to borrow money at low rates to undertake all sorts of academic and vocational development. Given the disruption that AI is likely to drive in the year ahead, maybe 2025 is the year we start to accept that skills and knowledge acquisition is truly a life long endeavour, and give it the respect and investment it requires.
AI (yawn) Agents
Sorry but I can’t do predictions for next year without mentioning AI and specifically, AI agents. Generative AI will be in everything in 2025, embedded deep in every digital device, and every software platform that you use regularly. But it's the possibility of agents that has a lot of people so excited.
This is because the best user interface is often no user interface at all. Why manually command a robot to do something, when it can just operate autonomously? This is the promise of agents, fire and forget software routines that can automate parts of your life and work with a greater level of intelligence and adaptability, and much more accessibility than previous robotic process automation (RPA) tools.
Work is all about When not where
The post-pandemic conversation has been about where we work, with arguments raging on about the return to the office. Still though, the default position for many has seemed to settle on some form of hybrid arrangement. Three days in, two days out. About a quarter of us now follow this pattern.
The next big battle will be about when we work. And I think it will really kick off in 2025. ‘When’ has three dimensions.
First there is the working day. We all have different rhythms, are productive at different times. Some people would naturally sleep late and start work at midday, really coming alive in the evenings. Others start early and are exhausted by early afternoon. As work becomes more creative, we’ll want to ensure workers are at their peak. But this is in tension with work also becoming more collaborative: sometimes you can’t do everything asynchronously and want to connect. Systems of work will change to accommodate this.
Then there’s the working week: how many hours is ‘right’? Again this comes back to the nature of work - can you do 40 hours of valuable, creative work in a week? But also productivity: can we eliminate wasted time at work and condense the valuable parts into four days rather than three?
Finally there’s the working year: how much of it should we spend at the grindstone, and how much should be leisure? Or perhaps a blend of the two? More people want extended travel experiences. Or to study for new skills. Can we create employment contracts and models of operation that allow us to release people for extended periods without losing all of their security, and without the business losing out?
We won’t solve these issues in 2025, but they’ll be a bigger part of the conversation.