ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2025: AI agents will significantly improve employee productivity - Related to 2023, our, neurips, will, next-generation
ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2025: AI agents will significantly improve employee productivity

ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2025 highlights the convergences between and among the five technologically enabled innovation platforms evolving today: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Energy Storage, Public Blockchains, and Multiomic Sequencing. In 2025, ARK elements 11 Big Ideas illustrating the massive transformations occurring today.
Also: AI agents will match 'good mid-level' engineers this year, says Mark Zuckerberg.
ARK's thematic investment strategies span market capitalizations, sectors, and geographies to focus on companies that we expect to be the leaders, enablers, and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation. Companies that ARK believes are capitalizing on disruptive innovation and developing technologies to displace older technologies or create new markets may not, in fact, do so.
Here are the 11 Big Ideas 2025 , including a focus on AI agents:
The Second Half of the Chessboard: Convergence among technology platforms leading to significant acceleration in macroeconomic growth AI Agents: Redefining consumer interactions and business workflows Bitcoin: A maturing global monetary system with sound network fundamentals and growing institutional adoption Stablecoins: Reshaping the digital asset space Scaling Blockchain: Enabling steep cost declines and new use cases at the application layer Robotaxis: Transforming personal mobility while lowering costs and enhancing safety Autonomous Logistics: Cutting costs, revolutionizing supply chains, and reshaping consumer behavior Energy: Powering the artificial intelligence revolution Robotics: Decoupling physical labor from output Reusable Rockets Multiomics: Operationalizing data with AI to transform diagnostics, drug discovery, and therapies.
ARK's research begins by highlighting the significant impact of AI on all other technologies. Enabled primarily by architectural improvements in AI systems, performance per dollar of AI compute is expected to improve more than 1,000x by 2030. At that time, we expect compute performance to have doubled 64 times since the advent of the integrated circuit. AI advances should unlock massive market opportunities. As AI continues to accelerate, robotaxis should proliferate, drug development timelines and costs should collapse, and AI agents should solve software engineering challenges autonomously, monitoring and modifying systems around the clock. Another key area of growth will be AI agents.
Also: The future of sales? These AI agents offer 24/7 ABC energy for SMBs.
What are AI agents? AI agents are poised to accelerate the adoption of digital applications and create an epochal shift in human-computer interaction. AI agents:
Understand intent through natural language.
Plan using reasoning and appropriate context.
Take action using tools to accomplish the intent.
Improve through iteration and continuous learning.
Here are examples of business, market, and innovation disruption opportunities based on wider adoption of AI agents in the next decade:
Consumer brand discovery: , AI agents will transform consumer search and discovery. Embedded in the operating systems of consumer hardware, AI agents empower consumers to delegate all discovery and research to AI -- a massive time-saver. Curated AI results will contextualize digital ad impressions.
AI Agents redefine consumer search and discovery ARK Invest 2025 Big Ideas.
Advertising spend: AI-mediated ads should take the lion's share of digital ad revenue by 2030. , if search shifts to personal AI agents, AI-mediated ad revenue could surge. By 2030, we believe AI ad revenue could account for more than 54% of the $[website] trillion digital ad market.
Also: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application customers.
Online Shopping: AI-mediated shopping is likely to approach 25% of addressable online sales globally by 2030. The growing use of AI agents in consumer shopping should streamline product discovery, personalization, and purchasing. ARK research hints at that AI agents could facilitate nearly $9 trillion in global gross online consumption by 2030.
AI agents powered shopping approach 25% of addressable online sales globally by 2030 ARK Invest 2025 Big Ideas.
AI-powered digital wallets: Digital wallets are positioned for continued share gains in e-commerce. ARK's research indicates that digital wallets empowered by AI purchasing agents -- taking share from payment methods like credit and debit cards -- could account for 72% of all e-commerce transactions by 2030.
Market consolidation: Digital wallets are consolidating financial services and e-commerce. Based on their consumer-facing operations, the market is valuing leading digital wallet platforms like Block, Robinhood, and SoFi at $1,800 per user today.
Also: 93% of IT leaders will implement AI agents in the next two years.
Enterprise growth in valuations: Purchasing agents should increase the enterprise value of digital wallets, notably in e-commerce. Based on lead-generation take rates, AI purchasing agents could generate global revenue between $40 billion and $200 billion -- ARK's base and bull cases, respectively -- for digital wallet platforms in 2030. In 2030, AI-powered purchasing agents could add between $50 and $200 per user to the enterprise value (EV) of digital wallets in the [website].
AI agents will increase employee productivity in the enterprise ARK Invest 2025 Big Ideas.
Increased employee productivity powered by software: In the enterprise, agents will increase productivity via software. Companies that deploy agents should be able to increase unit volume with the same workforce and/or optimize their workforce toward higher-value activities. As AI evolves, agents are likely to handle a higher percentage of workloads and complete higher-value tasks independently.
AI costs are declining: ARK notes that AI cost declines should impact agent economics significantly. ARK also notes that new products from Salesforce are supplementing human customer service representatives cost-effectively. Even at a fixed cost of $1 per conversation, AI agents could save enterprises significant sums once they can handle 35% of customer service inquiries. AI agents should also lower onboarding and hiring costs, as well as seat-based software costs, while scaling more easily than human labor.
Also: AI agents might be the new workforce, but they still need a manager.
Software developments cycles are shrinking: AI is also reshaping the software value chain. ARK notes that the coding skills of AI agents are improving rapidly, accelerating the software development lifecycle. As the cost to create software declines, software production should accelerate and sway enterprise "build vs. buy" decisions, displacing traditional software incumbents that are slow to adapt. As customer software proliferates, growth in all layers of the software stack should accelerate, even as share shifts toward the platform layer.
AI costs are declining, turbo charging the output for knowledge workers ARK Invest 2025 Big Ideas.
AI is supercharging knowledge workers: ARK concludes by highlighting how AI will supercharge knowledge work. Through 2030, ARK expects the amount of software deployed per knowledge worker to grow considerably as businesses invest in productivity solutions. Depending on adoption rates, global spend on software could accelerate from an annual rate of 14% over the last 10 years to annual rates of 18% to 48%.
Also: Autonomous businesses will be powered by AI agents.
ARK's Big Ideas 2025 highlights11 big ideas with comprehensive and compelling data and forecasting methodologies. The Autonomous Logistics and Robotics big ideas are equally compelling and speak to the 4th wave of AI innovation -- predictive, generative, agentic, and physical AI. All 11 big ideas benefit from AI advancements. To learn more about the Big Idea 2025 investigation, you can visit here.
SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images.
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Google DeepMind at NeurIPS 2023

Research Google DeepMind at NeurIPS 2023 Share.
Towards more multimodal, robust, and general AI systems Next week marks the start of the 37th annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS),the largest artificial intelligence (AI) conference in the world. NeurIPS 2023 will be taking place December 10-16 in New Orleans, USA. Teams from across Google DeepMind are presenting more than 180 papers at the main conference and workshops. We’ll be showcasing demos of our cutting edge AI models for global weather forecasting, materials discovery, and watermarking AI-generated content. There will also be an opportunity to hear from the team behind Gemini, our largest and most capable AI model. Here’s a look at some of our research highlights:
UniSim is a universal simulator of real-world interactions.
Generative AI models can create paintings, compose music, and write stories. But however capable these models may be in one medium, most struggle to transfer those skills to another. We delve into how generative abilities could help to learn across modalities. In a spotlight presentation, we show that diffusion models can be used to classify images with no additional training required. Diffusion models like Imagen classify images in a more human-like way than other models, relying on shapes rather than textures. What’s more, we show how just predicting captions from images can improve computer-vision learning. Our approach surpassed current methods on vision and language tasks, and showed more potential to scale. More multimodal models could give way to more useful digital and robot assistants to help people in their everyday lives. In a spotlight poster, wecreate agents that could interact with the digital world like humans do — through screenshots, and keyboard and mouse actions. Separately, we show that by leveraging video generation, including subtitles and closed captioning, models can transfer knowledge by predicting video plans for real robot actions. One of the next milestones could be to generate realistic experience in response to actions carried out by humans, robots, and other types of interactive agents. We’ll be showcasing a demo of UniSim, our universal simulator of real-world interactions. This type of technology could have applications across industries from video games and film, to training agents for the real world.
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Our next-generation model: Gemini 1.5

A note from Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai:
Last week, we rolled out our most capable model, Gemini [website] Ultra, and took a significant step forward in making Google products more helpful, starting with Gemini Advanced. Today, developers and Cloud clients can begin building with [website] Ultra too — with our Gemini API in AI Studio and in Vertex AI.
Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of our latest models with safety at the core. They are making rapid progress. In fact, we’re ready to introduce the next generation: Gemini [website] It presents dramatic improvements across a number of dimensions and [website] Pro achieves comparable quality to [website] Ultra, while using less compute.
This new generation also delivers a breakthrough in long-context understanding. We’ve been able to significantly increase the amount of information our models can process — running up to 1 million tokens consistently, achieving the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model yet.
Longer context windows show us the promise of what is possible. They will enable entirely new capabilities and help developers build much more useful models and applications. We’re excited to offer a limited preview of this experimental feature to developers and enterprise consumers. Demis shares more on capabilities, safety and availability below.
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Market Impact Analysis
Market Growth Trend
2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
23.1% | 27.8% | 29.2% | 32.4% | 34.2% | 35.2% | 35.6% |
Quarterly Growth Rate
Q1 2024 | Q2 2024 | Q3 2024 | Q4 2024 |
---|---|---|---|
32.5% | 34.8% | 36.2% | 35.6% |
Market Segments and Growth Drivers
Segment | Market Share | Growth Rate |
---|---|---|
Machine Learning | 29% | 38.4% |
Computer Vision | 18% | 35.7% |
Natural Language Processing | 24% | 41.5% |
Robotics | 15% | 22.3% |
Other AI Technologies | 14% | 31.8% |
Technology Maturity Curve
Different technologies within the ecosystem are at varying stages of maturity:
Competitive Landscape Analysis
Company | Market Share |
---|---|
Google AI | 18.3% |
Microsoft AI | 15.7% |
IBM Watson | 11.2% |
Amazon AI | 9.8% |
OpenAI | 8.4% |
Future Outlook and Predictions
The Invest Ideas 2025 landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by technological advancements, changing threat vectors, and shifting business requirements. Based on current trends and expert analyses, we can anticipate several significant developments across different time horizons:
Year-by-Year Technology Evolution
Based on current trajectory and expert analyses, we can project the following development timeline:
Technology Maturity Curve
Different technologies within the ecosystem are at varying stages of maturity, influencing adoption timelines and investment priorities:
Innovation Trigger
- Generative AI for specialized domains
- Blockchain for supply chain verification
Peak of Inflated Expectations
- Digital twins for business processes
- Quantum-resistant cryptography
Trough of Disillusionment
- Consumer AR/VR applications
- General-purpose blockchain
Slope of Enlightenment
- AI-driven analytics
- Edge computing
Plateau of Productivity
- Cloud infrastructure
- Mobile applications
Technology Evolution Timeline
- Improved generative models
- specialized AI applications
- AI-human collaboration systems
- multimodal AI platforms
- General AI capabilities
- AI-driven scientific breakthroughs
Expert Perspectives
Leading experts in the ai tech sector provide diverse perspectives on how the landscape will evolve over the coming years:
"The next frontier is AI systems that can reason across modalities and domains with minimal human guidance."
— AI Researcher
"Organizations that develop effective AI governance frameworks will gain competitive advantage."
— Industry Analyst
"The AI talent gap remains a critical barrier to implementation for most enterprises."
— Chief AI Officer
Areas of Expert Consensus
- Acceleration of Innovation: The pace of technological evolution will continue to increase
- Practical Integration: Focus will shift from proof-of-concept to operational deployment
- Human-Technology Partnership: Most effective implementations will optimize human-machine collaboration
- Regulatory Influence: Regulatory frameworks will increasingly shape technology development
Short-Term Outlook (1-2 Years)
In the immediate future, organizations will focus on implementing and optimizing currently available technologies to address pressing ai tech challenges:
- Improved generative models
- specialized AI applications
- enhanced AI ethics frameworks
These developments will be characterized by incremental improvements to existing frameworks rather than revolutionary changes, with emphasis on practical deployment and measurable outcomes.
Mid-Term Outlook (3-5 Years)
As technologies mature and organizations adapt, more substantial transformations will emerge in how security is approached and implemented:
- AI-human collaboration systems
- multimodal AI platforms
- democratized AI development
This period will see significant changes in security architecture and operational models, with increasing automation and integration between previously siloed security functions. Organizations will shift from reactive to proactive security postures.
Long-Term Outlook (5+ Years)
Looking further ahead, more fundamental shifts will reshape how cybersecurity is conceptualized and implemented across digital ecosystems:
- General AI capabilities
- AI-driven scientific breakthroughs
- new computing paradigms
These long-term developments will likely require significant technical breakthroughs, new regulatory frameworks, and evolution in how organizations approach security as a fundamental business function rather than a technical discipline.
Key Risk Factors and Uncertainties
Several critical factors could significantly impact the trajectory of ai tech evolution:
Organizations should monitor these factors closely and develop contingency strategies to mitigate potential negative impacts on technology implementation timelines.
Alternative Future Scenarios
The evolution of technology can follow different paths depending on various factors including regulatory developments, investment trends, technological breakthroughs, and market adoption. We analyze three potential scenarios:
Optimistic Scenario
Responsible AI driving innovation while minimizing societal disruption
Key Drivers: Supportive regulatory environment, significant research breakthroughs, strong market incentives, and rapid user adoption.
Probability: 25-30%
Base Case Scenario
Incremental adoption with mixed societal impacts and ongoing ethical challenges
Key Drivers: Balanced regulatory approach, steady technological progress, and selective implementation based on clear ROI.
Probability: 50-60%
Conservative Scenario
Technical and ethical barriers creating significant implementation challenges
Key Drivers: Restrictive regulations, technical limitations, implementation challenges, and risk-averse organizational cultures.
Probability: 15-20%
Scenario Comparison Matrix
Factor | Optimistic | Base Case | Conservative |
---|---|---|---|
Implementation Timeline | Accelerated | Steady | Delayed |
Market Adoption | Widespread | Selective | Limited |
Technology Evolution | Rapid | Progressive | Incremental |
Regulatory Environment | Supportive | Balanced | Restrictive |
Business Impact | Transformative | Significant | Modest |
Transformational Impact
Redefinition of knowledge work, automation of creative processes. This evolution will necessitate significant changes in organizational structures, talent development, and strategic planning processes.
The convergence of multiple technological trends—including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and ubiquitous connectivity—will create both unprecedented security challenges and innovative defensive capabilities.
Implementation Challenges
Ethical concerns, computing resource limitations, talent shortages. Organizations will need to develop comprehensive change management strategies to successfully navigate these transitions.
Regulatory uncertainty, particularly around emerging technologies like AI in security applications, will require flexible security architectures that can adapt to evolving compliance requirements.
Key Innovations to Watch
Multimodal learning, resource-efficient AI, transparent decision systems. Organizations should monitor these developments closely to maintain competitive advantages and effective security postures.
Strategic investments in research partnerships, technology pilots, and talent development will position forward-thinking organizations to leverage these innovations early in their development cycle.
Technical Glossary
Key technical terms and definitions to help understand the technologies discussed in this article.
Understanding the following technical concepts is essential for grasping the full implications of the security threats and defensive measures discussed in this article. These definitions provide context for both technical and non-technical readers.