Amber Hickman |
There is a seismic shift underway in the world of work, with 82 per cent of leaders stating that 2025 is a pivotal year to rethink strategy according to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report.
“We are entering a new reality – one in which AI can reason and solve problems in remarkable ways,” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work, in a blog post on the Microsoft website sharing the details of the report. “This intelligence on tap will rewrite the rules of business and transform knowledge work as we know it. Like the Industrial Revolution and the internet era, this transformation will take decades to show its full promise – and will bring broad technological, societal and economic change.”
Data from the report revealed the emergence of a new type of organisation, the Frontier Firm, which is built around intelligence on tap, human-agent teams and ‘agent boss’ being a new role for everyone. Currently, 71 per cent of workers at these firms say that their company is thriving.
One key theme of the report is the significance of AI as an asset that can improve not only organisational intelligence but also employee wellbeing.
“Intelligence is no longer bound by headcount or expertise,” said Spataro. “It’s an essential, durable good that is abundant, affordable and scalable on-demand. As economic and shareholder pressures grow, this on-demand intelligence offers a new lever for growth, one that can close the growing gap between business demands and human capacity.”
The report also found that 80 per cent of the global workforce lack the time or energy to do their job and that employees are interrupted by a meeting, email or ping every two minutes. To solve this issue, 82 per cent of leaders expect to use digital labour to expand their workforce in the next 12 to 18 months.
The rise in AI agents is another key trend from the report, with 46 per cent of leaders stating that their organisation is already using agents to fully automate workstreams or business processes.
However, to maximise the impact of human-agent teams, Spataro states that organisations need a new metric: the human-agent ratio.
“Leaders must ask two critical questions: How many agents are needed for which roles and tasks? And how many humans are needed to guide them?” he said. “Getting that ratio right will be critical and task specific. Organisations will need to consider if there are times when human and digital labour outperform AI alone, when customers prefer a human touch or when society expects people to be responsible for the consequences, like in a high-stakes product or finance decision.”
To further support organisations in this new era of work, Microsoft also revealed wave two of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Spring release, which includes Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Search and updates to Copilot Control System.