As both technology and the world of work continues to shift and advance, research firm Gartner has released the seven workplace tech predictions that HR leaders will need to take action on in 2025—and beyond—to ensure organisational competitiveness, talent retention, and the clinching of desired business outcomes.

Speaking on the new predictions and how they fall under three broad categories, Emily Rose McRae, who serves as senior director analyst in the Gartner HR practice, said: “This year’s predictions address three key challenges executives must tackle in 2025: New demands for a future-ready workforce, the evolving role of managers and leaders and emerging talent risks to organizational strategy.”

New Demands for a Future-ready Workforce

1. Embrace Collective Intelligence via Technology
In 2025, the largest-ever proportion of the global workforce will reach retirement age, draining organisations of their most experienced employees at an accelerated rate, Gartner said.

Simultaneously, technology has upended the relationship between expert and novice employees across industries. Employees also report a lack of hands-on training; a May 2024 Gartner survey of 3,375 employees found that six in 10 said they aren’t getting the on-the-job coaching they need to support their core job skills.

To address this threat to the expertise pipeline, Gartner advocates for organisations to begin embracing collective intelligence: technology-supported capabilities to ensure that knowledge can easily flow between experts who have skills and novice employees who need skills.

2. Organisational Redesign to Prepare for Tech Innovation
CEOs are focused on growth in 2025 with many citing technology—and AI specifically—as a significant facilitator. While generative AI solutions have not delivered on their promised productivity impact yet, the research firm said, the lacklustre results have shown the inherent and intractable barriers of current organisational structures to the adoption of new technological innovation.

This year, executives will make substantive changes to how their organisations operate, creating flatter, less hierarchical companies, centralising corporate functions to reduce duplicative work and create consistency, and investing in agile learning practices for fusion teams.

3. Experiment with Nudgetech
The current and future workforce comes with a wide array of cultural norms and increasingly varied expectations around communication, many of which are not compatible, Gartner explained. Conflict among employees is escalating and, along with a growing professional communication gap, is preventing collaboration and innovation.

To restore effective collaboration and cohesion, leading companies should experiment with nudgetech, an emerging set of AI-powered tools, in 2025. For example, companies can utilise AI to prompt employees to use email rather than text based on a particular client’s preferences, remind managers of their direct reports’ working styles, or generate custom communication tips.

“By offering hyper-personalized nudges with clear explanations for why the changes are recommended, nudgetech creates a double benefit of improved communication and increased behavior change,” said Kaelyn Lowmaster, director in the Gartner HR practice.

Evolving Role of Leaders and Managers

4. Embrace Bots that Assist in Management
The use of AI in performance management continues to be debated, but demand for AI in performance management is coming from an unexpected place—employees. An October 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees found that 87% of employees think that algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers right now. A June 2024 Gartner survey of more than 3,300 employees revealed that 57% believe humans are more biased than AI when it comes to making compensation decisions.

In addition to injecting increased objectivity into the workplace when done right, companies that leverage automated technology can take some challenging tasks off managers’ plates. Managers will still finalise major decisions, as the human in the loop verifying and validating the bots’ recommendations. For more everyday activities such as in-the-moment performance feedback, bots are likely to take on an increasing share of managers’ tasks.

5. Implement Guidelines Around AI-generated Work
Gartner stated that AI companies are actively marketing their tools as a workplace competency filter—a way for employees to make their efforts appear highly productive and impactful to their managers and colleagues.

Organisations, therefore, will need to determine new ways to define and reward high performance as it becomes harder to differentiate employees whose work quality stems from their own efforts from those who are reliant on AI. HR will need to develop clear guidelines on the AI-generated work that is and is not acceptable. They must train managers to recognise when employees are relying too much on AI and to intervene appropriately, the research firm advocated.

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Emerging Talent Risks to Organisational Strategy

6. Help Prioritise AI Deployments with an Employee-centric Lens
AI-first organisations are making organisational and strategic changes based on the short-term, next-quarter potential for GenAI while discounting long-term considerations, noted Gartner. These neglected longer-term effects can include increased work friction, the need for new role design and workflows, barriers to adoption, and more.

This year, progressive organisations will instead take an employee-centric lens that puts people at the center and technology features second. Using this lens, HR leaders can help leaders prioritise AI deployments and execute implementations successfully based on what employees need to be more productive and innovative. When companies take a human-first approach to AI, employees are 1.5 times more likely to be high performers and 2.3 times more likely to be highly engaged, said the research firm.

7. Co-create AI Strategies and Values with Employees
In the absence of organisational, government, or vendor action, employees are stepping up to shape the norms of human-technology collaboration themselves, explained Gartner.

This year, organisations will see continued employee activism driving the adoption of Responsible AI principles. Progressive companies will embrace this, co-creating their AI strategy and values with employees, including crowdsourcing AI use cases directly from employees before deciding which capabilities to pilot and incorporating multiple avenues for collecting and evaluating employee feedback.