Behind the Numbers: Technology Trends for 2025—AI Agents and the Smart Glasses Portal Into Spatial Computing

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Jacob Bourne:

The year of the AI agent, also known as Agentic AI. And what that means is the rise of these or the commercial deployment of these AI agents is going to really supercharge AI adoption and also add to the risks of AI.

Marcus Johnson:

Hey gang, it's Tuesday, January 21st, Jacob, Gadjo and listeners, I hope you all had really nice long weekends because of MLK Day. Welcome to Behind the Numbers, an EMARKETER Video podcast. I'm Marcus, and today I'm joined by two people. First off, we have our technology analyst based in Northern California, it's Jacob Bourne.

Jacob Bourne:

Hey, Marcus. Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson:

Hey, fella. And we're also joined by our senior editor for our technology and AI briefings. He is based on the other coast in New York City. It's Gadjo Sevilla.

Gadjo Sevilla:

Hey, Marcus, happy to be here. Good to see you.

Marcus Johnson:

Hey, chap, yes, coming to us live from our studio over there. Gents, we start with the fact of the day. Which animal has the fastest metabolism? This is going to be very hard to guess. There's a lot of animals so I'll just tell you.

Jacob Bourne:

Maybe a koala bear?

Marcus Johnson:

Oh, they were always eating?

Jacob Bourne:

Or panda bear I mean.

Marcus Johnson:

Is it the koala or the panda that always eats?

Jacob Bourne:

I think it's the panda that's always eating the eucalyptus leaves.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay, 90% of their life is spent eating. But that's a really good guess because of that behavior. So I'll explain. Stanford University notes that hummingbirds with their tiny bodies, high level of activity, have the highest metabolic rates of any animal, roughly a dozen times that of a pigeon. Because pigeons never fly anywhere. Has anyone ever seen a pigeon fly?

Jacob Bourne:

Coasts a little.

Marcus Johnson:

They do that little jump thing to get out the way.

Jacob Bourne:

A little jump thing, yeah,

Marcus Johnson:

Rush them, not that I've rushed a pigeon. But anyway, hummingbirds, because they're metabolic rate. They eat every 10 to 15 minutes and consume one and a half to three times their body weight in food per day. What a life.

Gadjo Sevilla:

But they're always moving too, right so it's just perpetual.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes.

Jacob Bourne:

And if I'm not mistaken, I think if they don't eat within a pretty short period of time, they will die, like 45 minutes or something.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh my goodness. That is dark. All right, on that... I was just about to say I should've been a hummingbird.

Jacob Bourne:

Don't quote me on that. It might not be 45 minutes, but it's something [inaudible 00:02:45].

Marcus Johnson:

Maybe not. It's stressful. Quick, I need a meal. You can understand why people would be hangry if that was the case. Anyway, today's real topic, the Great Behind the Numbers Take Off technology trends and predictions for 2025. Speaking of hangry, we should get through this as fast as possible because Gadjo was telling us if we don't finish in 20 minutes, he's going to start throwing things.

Gadjo Sevilla:

No, I might just die just right here.

Marcus Johnson:

Black out.

Jacob Bourne:

Like the hummingbird.

Marcus Johnson:

This is the great Behind the Numbers Takeoff technology trends and predictions for 2025. Great British Bake Off style for today's episode in which our takers or bakers will be cooking up one trend each for you three rounds. Signature take is round one. Round two, we have how it will technically play out challenge, and round three is the show stopping argument. Let's meet the contestants' predictions. Jacob, you're going first in each round. What's your prediction for us?

Jacob Bourne:

Yeah, so my prediction is that 2025 is going to be the year of the AI agent, also known as agentic AI. And what that means is the rise of these, or the commercial deployment of these AI agents is going to really supercharge AI adoption and also add to the risks of AI.

Marcus Johnson:

And Gadjo, what will you be cooking up for us?

Gadjo Sevilla:

So my take is all about smart glasses. So they're emerging to be the Goldilocks platform for integrating AI and mixed reality into both consumer and business applications. Our colleague Lisa Haiss went to CES last week and she saw a ton of smart glasses of every kind of make, and so we're probably going to see them become not the huge thing in 2025, but I think for at least the next decade, something as impactful as maybe the smart watch has been in the past 10 years.

Marcus Johnson:

All right, gents, let's look into these two trends a little bit more. Round one, signature take, our chefs will have one minute to explain the premise of their trend. So let's go with Jacob. He's talking about agentic AI will further spur AI while adding to the risks. So Jacob, tell us a bit more about this.

Jacob Bourne:

So just first of all, what are AI agents? It's basically they're AI tools that instead of a chatbot where you're constantly prompting each step, the tools actually can act in the background on your behalf. So they're much more autonomous. They can take on tasks like online shopping, writing code, booking flights, managing your investments for you. And so the more autonomous they are, the more tasks they can take on without you needing to say, "Do X, Y and Z."

Marcus Johnson:

And really quickly, you had a really great definition in your report on this, and I liked the way you said their ability to execute complex multi-step tasks independently with you say with minimal human oversight.

Jacob Bourne:

Yep.

Marcus Johnson:

Really quickly actually, you also say that they have the ability to understand broader goals and autonomously determine how to achieve them, which I thought was very interesting language as well. So this isn't just-

Jacob Bourne:

Yeah, and "understand" in heavy quotes.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes, yes.

Jacob Bourne:

They have to know how to navigate the internet, for example, in order to book a flight. So there's just a higher degree of capabilities and "understanding".

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, but please.

Jacob Bourne:

Yeah, so basically why is 2025 going to be the year of the AI agent? I think it's because the capabilities, they have matured a lot more. We're getting to the point where we're seeing companies like Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft actually deploy these AI agents with varying capabilities. Now, part of the reason why we haven't seen more deployment is that it really exacerbates the underlying risks of AI. So even though they can make AI a lot more useful, there are a lot of risks.

So for example, OpenAI, which has been talking about AI agents for a long time now, they've only now started to dip their toes into deploying and actually just today they're talked about releasing this thing called Tasks, very kind of light agentic behavior. And the reason why is because there's a thing called prompt injection where a bad actor could insert some malicious code into the AI agent and then instead of booking a flight for you, it's stealing in your identity in the background and you're not even aware of it. So there's a much higher ceiling for safeguards for AI agents than regular chatbots. But still you can see how an AI that can just do things for you without you needing to tell it could be very, very useful. And not just for consumers, but for companies that want to free up their employee schedules to take on more higher valued tasks.

Marcus Johnson:

And I think you had this research in your report, but companies hoping that AI agents can help them with a lot of different tasks, around 70% of organizations saying that they were interested in AI agents that can evaluate and rewrite code, create draft reports and iterate on them, and research internet content according to Cap Gem Research Institute. So they're expecting a lot from these things.

Gadjo, really quickly before we go to your take for round one, Kit Eaton of Ink wrote piece about Clem Delange CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face which is a machine learning and data science platform, he made some notably accurate AI predictions in 2024 and he had a list for 2025. One of them was he thinks there's going to be the first major public protest related to AI. Jacob just mentioned that these AI agents can be very helpful but might also be very disruptive. What do you make of that prediction?

Gadjo Sevilla:

Yeah, I think there's something to consider there, especially since a lot of companies are looking at agentic AI as a replacement for actual jobs. So what can these agents do? They can carry out tasks and if you can set a predetermined number of tasks that are usually attributed to workers, say coders or programmers, then you can see a wider impact on the workforce. So that could be part of that.

Marcus Johnson:

All right, let's move to your take, Gadjo for round one, which is about smart glasses and how they're going to emerge as the gateway to mass market spatial computing.

Gadjo Sevilla:

So in 2024 we saw a lot of these AI gadgets, like AI pins, the Rabbit r1 just to name a few, and these missed the mark because they were just another device that you needed to have connected to your phone. With regards to smart glasses, as we've seen from the Meta Ray-Bans, they're generally inexpensive and even users that don't need, say prescription eyeglasses are likely to get smart frames as sunglasses. So there is a less steep way towards adoption for this kind of product. And we've seen from the way a lot of people have reacted to, say the Meta Ray-Bans and similar products, that it's something that could more easily be adopted into people's lives. It also does have some enterprise applications. Now it does have some limitations too because A, it does need a connection to the internet, to your phone, battery life is very limited at this point, and it's still an extra solution looking for a problem to solve right now. But as these technologies get better, I foresee them being adapted more steadily and it's-

Marcus Johnson:

Really quickly, Jacob, Gadjo has mentioned it's a solution looking for a problem. That seems to be the case for me. I understand the point of view content creation is interesting and for creators that might be a useful reason to buy a pair of these, but for me the privacy issue seems insurmountable. Every time you look at someone with these glasses, you can be thinking to yourself, "Are they filming me?"

Gadjo Sevilla:

Yeah, I have to say though, not all of them have cameras so we're seeing some that just have assistive technologies.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Gadjo Sevilla:

So they do have speakers, they do have microphones. But yeah, the camera thing I think is going to be a divisive issue.

Jacob Bourne:

Yeah, and of course you don't always automatically know which smart glasses have cameras or not if you're someone just in public seeing someone with a pair of glasses on. I think so many things in the tech industry are like this. They release products and oftentimes they seem like solutions in search of problems. And like other tech products, there's often privacy issues with them. Now that doesn't always stop them from becoming popular or at least getting adopted. So I think smart glasses, the strictest smart glasses are over just other AI systems like the Humane Pin for example, is that it's more than just a device to host an AI assistant. It also has that those AR features. And unlike a VR headset that gives you the virtual experience, smart glasses are lightweight, they're stylish, you can wear them out in the world without being conspicuous. So I think that the smart glasses, while it might be true that they're a solution in search of a problem, they solve other problems that other tech products haven't been able to solve, at least from a consumer adoption standpoint, I think.

And so, while I don't see smart glasses replacing the smartphone in terms of being this next big ubiquitous tech device, I think we are going to see a lot of traction in terms of consumers buying smart glasses. They're relatively inexpensive products. You have the AR plus the AI features for many of them, and they're inconspicuous, lightweight, and someone might not even know that you have smart glasses. So I think all those reasons I think are going to be a strong basis for consumer adoption.

Marcus Johnson:

So we've already found ourselves in round two, which is a nice transition, the how it would technically play out challenge. Explain a bit more detail about these different trends. So we'll keep going. Gadjo, I'll stay with yours for a second because Jacob had written in his report that Apple is likely to enter the smart glasses fray eventually. What might that look like and how much do you see that moving the needle?

Gadjo Sevilla:

That'll be a big one because as you know, Apple never really comes in as the first mover. And again, for me, the closest parallel are smartwatches. So they weren't the first smartwatch with the Apple Watch. I think [inaudible 00:14:52] may have been the first one, but in 10 years they totally dominated the market to the extent that they outsold just regular digital watches. So yeah, I would expect Apple, possibly Google, even Samsung to get in on this market. And again, it could take 10 years before it really becomes mass adoption. In fact, I think the CTE said you, the market is expected to grow for smart glasses from 5 billion in 2022 to 231 billion by 2032.

Marcus Johnson:

Wow. Yeah, there was some research saying that overall AR headset market worldwide expected to triple from 2023 to 2028. That was from Artillery Intelligence. So it seems like a market that is taking off. With Apple, is it more ecosystem that's going to sell them or is it something that they're going to do technically that you imagine is going to be better than the others?

Gadjo Sevilla:

They've thrown their weight behind mixed reality, but that's been slow. That's been a flop, sad to say. So I think they need to look down market and maybe something that's not as expensive, not as connected, but has similar hooks into their ecosystem.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, similar platform.

Gadjo Sevilla:

Yeah, and that's also fashion forward because as we know, that's Apple's big aspiration. They want to be a vogue brand, and so I could totally see them get behind that, even if it's just an accessory to the iPhone at first.

Marcus Johnson:

Jacob, let's move to your trend for round two quickly here. So could you start by giving us the lay of the land? Who's doing when it comes to commercializing AI agents?

Jacob Bourne:

Well, yeah, we're seeing, again, Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft have released AI agent platforms really targeting the enterprise. Google is working on an AI agent project, though they just at CES announced a Google automotive AI agent for Mercedes Benz, which that's going to be a consumer product. OpenAI plans to release AI agents this year but they're moving slowly, again for that same reason I mentioned earlier about the risk involved of bad actors taking over an AI agent and doing malicious things with them. However, like I said, they did just release their Tasks or they are on the verge of releasing Tasks, which is basically a tool that can do a task for you in the future. So it can remind you to renew your passport or schedule a calendar update or something like that, a very basic level of agentic capabilities.

Gadjo Sevilla:

And I think right now it's just web-based, so it's not a standalone application. You'd have to have it running-

Jacob Bourne:

That said though, I think that we are going to see OpenAI release more capable AI agents sometime this year. And just like with everything else with the AI sector, once a few companies start doing it, then the pressure for everybody to start doing it becomes very high and you're at risk of not staying competitive if you don't. So not just OpenAI, but I think we're going to see more AI agents will be released by other companies. We might see some open source agentic models hit the market allowing third parties to build off of them.

Marcus Johnson:

Really quickly, Jacob, will these bots and AI agents speak to each other?

Jacob Bourne:

Yeah, so that's a great question and I think this is one of the big implications. Now, before I answer that, I just want to just caution that we're going to see this whole term AI agent, I think we already are, see it get thrown around. So just like everybody's working on AGI, everybody has an AI agent. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're all that autonomous. So for example, Google's automotive AI agent. Now how agentic it actually is going to be, who knows?

So I think that's the big thing is that when you have AI agents doing things like shopping, well, then that means that it's not just humans that are the audience for things like digital advertising. Now you have AI as actually the audience.

Marcus Johnson:

Interesting.

Jacob Bourne:

You have AI that might be consuming content that's produced by another AI. So yes, the more we see this deploy, the more capable they become. We're going to see AI agents communicating not just with humans but with each other, carrying out tasks with each other, being each other's audience in some way. And I'm not even sure anyone even understands the full implications of this.

Marcus Johnson:

What it means, yeah.

Jacob Bourne:

To have AI consuming content that way and communicating with each other. I think one can only imagine that it's going to be a risk multiplier for AI. And so although the vision with AI agents is this fully autonomous reality where humans can just set it and forget it like everything, I think that the risk is going to be a barrier to really seeing that reach fruition. And I think we're really going to see just a need for human oversight on some capacity of what are these AI agents doing in the background or are they really doing what they should be doing?

Marcus Johnson:

I think it's going to be a big year, but we shouldn't expect that by the end of the year everyone's going to be using these agents.

Jacob Bourne:

Right, absolutely.

Marcus Johnson:

There was some research from Gartner, by 2028, at least 15% of daily business decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from obviously 0% last year. But also by that time, to what you've been saying this whole time, 25% of enterprise breaches will be tied to AI agent abuse.

Jacob Bourne:

That's a great point. So even though companies are really excited about agentic AI, we can only imagine they're going to be also pretty nervous about just signing off autonomy to AI agents to work in the background, just like many were nervous about chatbots. AI agents probably pose even higher risk.

Now on the consumer front, I think the average consumer is a bit more wary about AI than the average business, I would say. And so I think that consumers getting exposed to AI agents on their PC, on their smartphone, I think that there's going to be adoption there too but I think that there's going to be more caution in big part because, obviously on the enterprise end, it's that cost savings, it's that time savings that's such an allure. I think your average consumer doesn't necessarily have that same desire to just cut costs in that way. So anybody who has some reservations about letting AI just do things on the web for them might be a bit more wary about starting to use AI agents.

Marcus Johnson:

Gents, I don't think we even need round three to be honest. You made some really good arguments, both of you, one on the agentic AI side, one on the smart glasses side, so it's now time to crown a star taker or baker. And today I'm going to give the award to Jacob for agentic AI. Still skeptical about smart glasses. When Gadjo chose it, I was like, no, because I'm not sure it's going to be a thing, but it seems like it's a big push. You mentioned CES, which is often a bellwether to how people feel and what they're going to be trying to push, especially if Apple gets in. So it's really fascinating. But agentic AI does feel like a bit of the trend of the moment.

I was also reading it could have some very, very useful applications, maybe some ones which aren't so great, but there was one I was reading German telecoms giant Deutsche Telecom, rolling out an AI agent for its employees to ask any question about internal policies and benefits. It can also be used by service staff to ask questions about its products and services. Anyone who's ever worked at a company you know trying to find the right person who knows the right answer to the question you have can be difficult. Something like this, I think could be quite useful. So yeah, I think it's going to have a lot of applications. That's why Jacob wins today. If you want to read the other three big technology trends from Jacob's report, pro subscribers, you can head to emarketer.com and search for tech trends to watch in 2025, Five AI and design advances reshaping how consumers engage, link in the show notes. Thank you so much to my guests for today's episode. Thank you first to Gadjo.

Gadjo Sevilla:

Thanks again.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you to Jacob.

Jacob Bourne:

Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson:

And thank you to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John, Lance, and Danny, Stuart who runs the team, and Sophie who does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in or watching along. We hope to see you Wednesday for the Reimagining Retail Show, hosted by Sarah Lebow, an EMARKETER podcast.