As OpenAI and Google joust this December, with the former’s 12 Days of innovation, and the latter strongly countering with Gemini 2, I look beyond these skirmishes to predict my Twelve Trends for AI going into 2025 and beyond. I will describe them over three columns in this publication. Each of these have a theme, and today’s four predictions are around how humans and AI will draw closer to each other – in work, life, and relationships. Gartner was prescient when it said that “AI is not just a trend or technology, but a fundamental shift in how humans and machines interact”, and this describes the theme for today’s four predictions very well.

Prediction One of Twelve: English is the new coding

As our generation was growing up, we were told that learning English was the passport to success; we did that and were, arguably, successful in our careers and businesses. Our children, in turn, are told that learning how to code is the passport to success, thus coding was the new English, leading to ten-year olds dragged to code camps to learn Python and JavaScript. With generative AI, this changes: every time we write an English prompt for ChatGPT or any of its ilk, we are actually ‘coding’ i.e. giving it a set of instructions to perform some task for us, whether a summarization or a video-creation or writing up an article. Except that now we are doing it in our natural human language, rather than the language of the machine. This is very profound, as it has the potential to democratize coding and make eight billion of us code. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella declaimed that instead of learning the machine’s language, machines would have to learn ours; Jensen Huang of Nvidia joined the chorus saying that the true potential of AI is that none of us would have to learn how to code. Thus English, or any other natural language, becomes the new coding

Prediction Two of Twelve: AI is the new UI

AI becomes the new user interface (UI). Bill Gates presciently wrote in Nov 2023 (https://bit.ly/3tSMNkB): “…you won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.” UI has been how humans and machines have interacted with each other, as the difficult UIs of machine language and DOS gave way to GUI (Graphical User Interface), search bars, browsers, and apps. Simpler and friendlier UI led to a faster, intuitive and more productive interaction with a machine. The AI-driven fundamental shift will lead to voice UI, as the spoken word becomes the new way to interact with machines, similar to the interactions with other humans. We will chat with ChatGPT or Gemini to work with them on our day to day tasks. Our devices will morph with voice becoming the primary interface, rather than a large screen. The first proto-devices are already out, though not terribly successful, like the Rabbit R1 and the AI Pin. An AI assistant becomes the new UI

Prediction Three of Twelve: AI and Humans are the new creators

GenAI is a cognitive technology, and can do creative tasks like writing, creating art and writing poetry. This has left many human creators deeply worried about their jobs, as creativity was supposed to be uniquely human skill. I believe, however, that Generative AI will boost human creativity. Take OpenAI’s Sora, for instance, just released last week. When Sam Altman had teased it to us a year back, he had invited creative prompts on X to instantly generate videos with the same. Indian entrepreneur Kunal Shah famously gave ‘A bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes riding the bicycles with drone camera view’ and Sora produced a spectacularly creative video (https://bit.ly/3ZgGnHD). However, it was not Sora which was

being creative but Kunal, who would not have imagined a creation like this, unless he had a tool like Sora or Runway to manifest his innate human creativity. Thus, I believe, that the combination of humans and AI will give rise to a new era of creativity

Prediction Four of Twelve: AI creates a new customer I wrote about this in detail last fortnight (https://bit.ly/4ffrueN ).The Industrial revolution brought with it the transactional Industrial customer who rarely used technology, and the Internet brought the digital comparison-driven and social customer who searched and clicked her way through brands. A new kind of customer will emerge in this age of AI – someone who lives in the era of infinite hyper-personalised choice, has immersive and conversational interaction with brands, AI that anticipates her needs and a brand relationship that is collaborative rather than functional or emotional. This will mean a gut-wrenching change in business and marketing, as they race to adjust to this new reality.

The next set of predictions will be around what I consider the biggest trend of 2025 – Agentic AI. Until then, watch this space, or if impatient, navigate your way to this video (https://bit.ly/4fnaJ1h ) where I talk about all twelve trends at once.