Something former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told an audience at the recent Zendesk Relate 2025 conference caught my attention. “My experience with people who ever doubt themselves is that they will prepare, they will read everything, they will reach out to the experts, they’ll do their job with humility because they won’t believe they have all the answers,” she said. Ardern’s approach is commendable, particularly when paired with decisive action. She emphasized that governments need to be transparent with the risks, regarding Artificial Intelligence, and take care of citizens proactively. Numerous societal problems have already been associated with AI. In any case, AI still requires human input and guidance.
This made me think. There already are a myriad of use cases for AI that most readers are aware of (see examples on this website), but what is the future of AI? We often say that we are just scratching the surface of AI’s potential – a thought I agree with – but what about the future? What roles will AI play in the coming years? What are some possibilities in the near future? Here is my list that I hope acts as a catalyst for some thinking and to act as a time capsule.
- Productivity enhancements
- Prevalence (similar to how the Internet is available everywhere) in many different things and to assist humans enabled by 5G
- Scientific modelling and breakthroughs
- AI expert and custodian roles
- Companionship – for romance, therapy or friendship
- Powering robots and making them more capable
- Agentic AI for healthcare, financial services, law offices, government services and translation services
- Analytics that use NLP to understand and be understood. Analysis and Business Intelligence tools accessible to the masses
- Contractual agreements aside, AI-generated actors replacing human performers
- More lies, fabrication and fake news and imagery – virtually indistinguishable from the real things
- Finally, personally, I hope to see robust AI regulations and oversight enacted.
Things That Need To Go Away: era of reactive and ad-hoc approaches to AI
