The future is enterprise AI: welcome to workplace 5.0

Generative AI (gen AI) isn’t just a tech trend; it’s reshaping industries at every level. From personalizing shopping experiences to enhancing fraud detection in finance, we’re beginning to see its transformative potential. But what’s next? Enter enterprise AI.

Enterprise AI is set to blend business strategy with advanced technology, driving continuous transformation across organizations. By combining AI tools like gen AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) with orchestration, enterprise AI optimizes operations, boosts productivity, and upholds high standards of quality, security, and governance. This approach enables businesses to apply gen AI strategically across their operations, maximizing its potential impact.

As we look toward 2025, companies investing in enterprise AI will benefit not only from gen AI but from a comprehensive suite of AI tools purpose-built to reshape the workplace. With enterprise AI as a true vehicle for realizing the promise of gen AI, we anticipate three major trends that will define how industries leverage AI to meet future demands.

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Welcome to workplace 5.0

Workplace 5.0 takes the era of automation further, emphasizing and strengthening the collaborations between humans and technology. Industry 5.0 is where humans, AI, robotics and digital-integrated activity combine.

Central to this is orchestration: with business process management (BPM) and other tools, organizations can integrate human and digital workflows end-to-end. The key to successful operations is no longer simply orchestrating human work but integrating work as a whole. This will bring together workflows, inputs, outputs and the resources that drive the work, humans, gen AI and enterprise agents to create a smarter, more collaborative, engaging and productive work environment.

Enterprise AI will allow us to move on from the individual efficiency gains we have seen through the likes of ChatGPT, to a grown-up implementation of gen AI where leaders have the opportunity to revolutionize the end-to-end processes on a large scale. This shift will lead to more human-centric work, making enterprises more creative, adaptive and customer-focused.

Human-centric collaboration with enterprise AI agents

The next evolution of gen AI’s integration with the enterprise is to make interactions feel more lifelike. This will be achieved through experiential interfaces, enabling humans to communicate with enterprise agents in natural language. We’ll see this manifest in the form of copilot-like interfaces, which are posed to dramatically enhance productivity, drive innovation and transform industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and financial services.

While AI agents are not new, 2025 will mark the rise in more advanced business agents with specialized knowledge on specific industries.  These enterprise agents are not meant to replace human workers, but rather to function as coworkers that support and enhance performance. They will autonomously handle delegated tasks, continuously learning and improving through agentic AI.

Previously, these tools required coding and a structured approach to building applications. Now, gen AI has leveled the playing field, allowing people to turn their ideas into reality through natural language prompts.

Mitigating risks with enterprise AI governance

As generative AI tools advance quickly, there’s growing concern about their potential to create privacy and security risks. With the possible consequences of a rogue agent (rogue AI) such as business/supply chain disruption, reputational damages and customer loss, it’s worth considering these concerns.

To navigate this, organizations will need enterprise-grade guardrails, succinct integrations of gen AI into critical workflows and a robust AI governance model that prioritizes transparency, documentation, and bias prevention. This ensures AI solutions enhance, not jeopardize, the business.

Enterprise AI: turning potential into impact

Enterprise AI will be the game-changer for organizations ready to get the most out of generative AI, applied strategically and effectively across their entire operations. As we look ahead to 2025, companies that embrace enterprise AI will gain unparalleled access to gen AI’s benefits—not just in isolated applications, but through integrated processes combining RPA, orchestration, machine learning, and more. This convergence will enable organizations to turn the potential of gen AI into tangible results, achieving the scale and impact that early AI applications only hinted at. The era of delivering on AI’s promise across the enterprise has arrived.

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Key stats/ quotes:

Welcome to workplace 5.0:

• “The organizations that win […] won’t necessarily be the ones who embrace gen AI the best, but the ones who create the processes necessary to combine humans, robotics and digitally generated work together in the most efficient and effective way for growth and sustained productivity.”
  James Kelly, senior solution marketing manager, SS&C Blue Prism
• “We’re seeing a single generation experiencing multiple revolutions. This type of change requires serious planning and a framework to adopt the newer technologies while continuously reskilling employees to adapt to working alongside AI-powered digital workers”

Michael Marchuk, VP strategic advisor at SS&C Blue Prism

• “In Workplace 5.0, the workforce in the new Industry 5.0 will demand greater connectivity between human and digital work, substantially more than we have today. To succeed in the coming decades, it will be essential to identify structures for effective communication between the two using chatty/natural language interfaces but also in the orchestration of the inputs, outputs, workflows and the resources themselves to create effective end-to-end business processes.” James Kelly, senior solution marketing manager, SS&C Blue Prism

Human-centric collaboration with enterprise AI agents

• 63% of work being complemented by [gen AI], and with the remainder (20%) being unaffected. — Generative AI and the Future of Work, Deloitte AI Institute™
• “The working world has always adapted with technology advances and new roles have been created or have been modified in line with the changes in the ways of working. With the adoption of generative AI, we will continue to adapt and enhance our skills, and work will be more interesting and meaningful for the human workforce.”

Emma Kirby-Kidd, head of methodologies, SS&C Blue Prism

Mitigating risks with enterprise AI governance

• 34% of AI decision-makers at enterprise firms indicated that governance and risk are a major barrier to gen AI adoption. — Forrester’s July 2023 Artificial Intelligence Pulse Survey – Generative AI: What It, Means For Governance, Risk
• “Like with any software deployment within an organization, integrating generative AI without proper governance can lead to significant risks – like the spread of biased or incorrect information, security issues like data breaches and the creation of content that could be ethically questionable, such as deepfakes.” Emma Kirby-Kidd, head of methodologies at SS&C Blue Prism
• “… While easy to use on the surface, using these tools safely requires more skill than many realize. […] The adoption of generative AI will require […] a well-considered AI governance model, supported by the appropriate guardrails built into gen AI-enabled software wherever possible. This will enable organizations to minimize and manage risks according to their own internal risk appetite and corporate/IT governance standards.”

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