2025 could be the year when AI agents take wing, says futurist

Peter Schwartz acknowledges challenges from bad actors and geopolitical road bumps, but is broadly optimistic about the future.

- Vikram Khanna

During his recent visit to Singapore, the futurist and world-renowned scenario planner Peter Schwartz wanted to change the arrangements for his return flight. He tried to do it through the Singapore Airlines app, but that didn't work for him. So, he turned to the airline's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital agent. "Within seconds, it was able to update my reservation, make the booking and issue me my boarding pass," he says.

Mr Schwartz, 78, has been working on AI since the 1970s, having written books and even movie scripts about it. Now, as Chief Futures Officer of the customer-relationship management company Salesforce, he is a champion of "agentic AI" - whereby artificially intelligent agents, acting like virtual humans, can not only make complex decisions, but also act on them.

It represents one of the latest innovations in AI - the progression from Large Language Models (LLMs), which, like ChatGPT, can generate content, answer questions, analyze and summarize, to Large Action Models (LAMs), which can not only do all that, but also take action. For instance, an LLM can find you flights, hotels or restaurants, but it can't make bookings, whereas an LAM can.

Mr Schwartz believes that 2025 will be a breakout year for agentic AI, in which LAMs will start to transform business, governance and society, including in Singapore.

EMBEDDED AI AGENTS "We're going to see agents embedded in many different functions," he says. "The first big one is things like service centers. About 80 to 90 per cent of calls can be handled by digital agents.