How agentic AI is changing HR dynamics in 2025

Pent-up demand will lead to a surge of funding

Driving the HR tech market

Few activities gain more attention in HR tech than funding rounds and market transactions. The frequency of these announcements peaked in 2021 but declined from 2022–2024, impacted by high interest rates, concerns of a possible recession, and a focus on integrating GenAI capabilities into existing solution sets.¹ As these conditions adjust, we anticipate that improved macroeconomic factors and pent-up demand will likely lead to a surge of funding and a flurry of mergers and acquisitions activity across 2025.

How will investment funding rebound in 2025?

Threats of a looming recession and higher interest rates prompted actions from institutions including the Bank of England, European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve.² But with a funding market now more susceptible to reasonable financing and a record US$1.2 trillion in liquid securities, the demand for funding that’s been building for years may finally see movement in 2025. Global deal value paced to finish 2024 at US$521 billion, an 18% increase over the US$442 billion deal value of 2023.³

Global enterprise spend—the fastest growing segment of IT budgets—is expected to grow 14% in 2025, thanks in no small part to the potential for market growth around AI integration.⁴ From a strategic investment perspective, the speed of technology development will lead to industry leaders pursuing innovative solutions more aggressively.

Prepare for agent-enhanced technology

Agentic AI

Agentic AI—autonomous GenAI agent solutions—represents a significant evolution in AI tech, characterized by its ability to understand context, remember past interactions, connect to external tools and data, and execute actions to achieve defined goals.⁵ Unlike traditional AI models limited to executing specific tasks, agentic AI systems can automate entire workflows, making them powerful collaborators in business processes.

Preparing for agent-enhanced technology

AI agents have the potential to automate complex processes, reduce the need for human intervention, and help organizations adapt to real-time changes—together boosting productivity and enhancing machine-powered intelligence and transparency. To prepare for effective experimentation and deployments, HR leaders should consider:

• Prioritizing workflows: Identify tasks and workflows based on the technology/s capabilities and value for company operations. Review and redesign workflows to remove unnecessary steps and ensure clear goals.
• Focusing on data governance and cybersecurity: To deliver value, agentic AI must have access to valuable and potentially sensitive enterprise data. Companies will therefore need to follow regulations and implement strong data governance and cybersecurity guardrails.
• Balancing risk and reward: Consider the level of autonomy and data access agents will need to execute work. Low-risk use cases will involve noncritical data and human oversight.

Get a clear understanding of your workforce

Combining multiple skills

Agentic AI carries great potential, but to truly recognize its capacity to augment the way work gets done, organizations must understand the skills and capabilities of the human workforce. Deloitte research finds AI-enabled, skills-based organizations are 79% more likely to drive positive workforce experiences and 63% more likely to achieve organizational outcomes.⁶ But despite the potential of the skills-based organization, capturing a workforce/s real-time skills inventory remains a challenge.

AI-enabled skills validation—the process of verifying and assessing the skills and competencies of individual workers to ensure they meet expectations—offers a solution. Unlike traditional skills assessments, AI-enabled skills validation uses objective measures and real-time data to provide a more accurate and reliable evaluation of an individual/s capabilities. In the coming year we anticipate seeing solution providers develop a more robust approach to balancing active and passive skills validation for their customer organizations that have otherwise been reliant on a toolkit of multiple solutions.

Enhancing workforce management with skills validation

Skills validation and continuous assessment and feedback support talent management by providing a clear understanding of the skills within the organization and highlighting opportunities to adapt to changes in the market. However, deploying traditional, organizationwide assessments on a recurring basis is not a sustainable or productive approach. Instead, HR leaders should consider:

• Creating centralized skills intelligence: Utilize multiple HR technology solutions, human capital management suites, learning solutions, talent intelligence tools, and point skills solutions to consolidate skills information on the workforce.
• Inventorying skills validation approaches: Understand your active (e.g., self-evaluation questionnaires, interviews) and passive (e.g., learning history, performance feedback) sources of information about skills proficiency.
• Determining needed capabilities: Explore enabling solution capabilities to enhance and update relevant skills information. This can include real-time integration across systems and nudges to individuals for human checks on accuracy.
• Aligning on skill validation timing: Prioritize the most valuable skills for validation to reflect urgency for accurate and timely skills validation balanced within organizational cycles.

Make informed recruitment decisions

Enhancing workforce alignment

Over the past few years, both HR organizations and their workforces have agreed that jobs / job titles are no longer the best way to organize work. Instead, they’re turning to talent intelligence: the strategic use of workforce and labor market data and analytics to enhance workforce management processes, enabling organizations to make informed decisions regarding recruitment, workforce planning and development.⁷ We predict that in 2025 strategic workforce planning for the future will require a focus on tasks to be aligned to the right work executor—whether human worker or technology—and organizations will increasingly harness talent intelligence data to make those connections.

Prioritizing tasks in talent intelligence

Investing in talent intelligence solutions, with its analysis focused on roles and skills, can help organizations maintain a competitive edge in talent acquisition, improve workforce planning, and strengthen employee retention.⁸ As HR leaders advance their talent intelligence approach with additional tasks analysis in 2025, they should consider:

• Engaging skills solution providers: Engage with your HR technology provider/s customer success or account team to understand how tasks are considered and factored alongside skills in their operations and future product vision.
• Forecasting with workforce planning: Evaluate how both concepts of skills and tasks are considered in forecasting future workforce needs.
• Redesigning job architecture efforts: Examine how jobs are currently structured across roles and functions and what flexibility and adjustment considerations may be required as technology augments workflows.
• Reflecting on learning and development: In parallel to job redesign efforts and adjustments to workforce planning forecasts, consider how L&D can support upskilling within and reskilling across career paths.

Support your human users by adapting to them

Tailored experiences

More and more of the workforce is becoming comfortable with using GenAI in daily work, from prescribing meeting agendas and talking points to transcribing meeting minutes. The use of generative capabilities in work technology to automate routine and tedious tasks is now commonplace just as it is within HR tech applications. From observing successful past outputs to improving prompts, work tech is advancing how to better support human users. As workers continue in 2025 to refine and advance their use of GenAI capabilities in work technology, so too will their user-specific data be used to personalize their preferences and representations.

Preparing for worker's increased digital presence

As work technology becomes more "human" in 2025, HR organizations and workforces should consider how much personalized likeness and other personal data is useful—and what to do with that information when a worker leaves an organization. To prepare for work technology/s increased personalization of the workforce, HR leaders can consider:

• Labeling GenAI content: Explicitly note when AI was used in creation of content with digital watermarking or other methods of provenance verification.
• Maintaining cybersecurity standards and training: Ensure the cybersecurity practices of providers that engage with worker images and likenesses are equipped to safeguard against identity theft and the creation of deepfakes.
• Staying aware of personal identity regulations: Remain vigilant amid developing personal identity regulations, stay in touch with relevant providers when new rules and laws are enacted.

Bring change by focusing on the individual teams

Microcultures

Efforts to quantify the employment value proposition can provide invaluable insights into the workforce experience of a given organization, and annual talent surveys can bolster those insights at the macro level. But organizations aren/t monoliths. Instead, they/re composed of microcultures that can vary at the department, office location and team levels.

Surfacing powerful insights on microculture

Most organizations have already invested in workforce listening practices and enabling solutions, and team-level data is often already available. Rather than waiting for regional or department-focused reports, HR leaders can prioritize delivering insights to relevant team leaders and managers to influence culture at the operational level. These leaders should consider:

• Focusing microcultures on work: Look at team-level priorities and help shape microcultures by providing workers with the agency to determine where, how and when they execute and collaborate on work.
• Embracing microcultures in talent processes: Encourage senior leaders to promote transparency around microcultures as an opportunity to align on teamwide personality and preferences.
• Continuously sensing microcultures: Deploy workforce listening capabilities at the microculture level to provide information and feedback; this enables team leaders to immediately react to challenges or divergences from the broader values of an organization.