Imagine a world where your digital colleague handles entire workflows, adapts to real-time challenges, and collaborates seamlessly with your human team. This isn’t science fiction—it’s the imminent reality of AI agents in the workplace. 

As Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, boldly predicted at their annual DevDay event, “2025 is when AI agents will work.” But what does this mean for the future of human labor, organizational structures, and the very definition of work itself? 

According to research by The Conference Board, 56% of workers use generative AI on the job, and nearly 1 in 10 use generative AI tools daily. 

As we move into this AI-enabled stage of business, it’s essential to understand the transformative potential of AI agents, explore how they’re set to revolutionize the workplace, and challenge ourselves to reconceptualize the human-machine partnership in the world of work.

The workplace is at an inflection point. Rapid advancements in AI, intensifying polarization, eroding employee perks and protections, and shifting employee expectations are transforming the role of HR in unprecedented ways. These trends demand bold, strategic responses from HR leaders who must balance technological adoption with human-centered leadership, global instability, and increasing demands to do more with less. 

After taking last year off, I’m back to weigh in on the evolving landscape of HR and people operations in the new year. You can check out past year predictions for 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020. (Looking back, I had more hits than misses, although I’m still haunted by that Metaverse pick. Alas, Zuckerberg.)

So, what will the HR landscape look like in 2025? From redefining job roles in the age of AI to reimagining the workplace, HR leaders are navigating uncharted territory. The future demands agility, and HR is again at the helm of this change. 

Here are seven key trends reshaping the future of work.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

It’s easy to conjure Charles Dickens’s famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities when reflecting on the period of time from 2021’s Great Resignation through today. So many U.S. workers have recently experienced a juxtaposition of hope and despair, opportunity and uncertainty, prosperity and hardship. 

To better understand where we are today, we must go back to the convergence of events in 2021 that got us here. 

During the seismic shift of the Great Resignation, millions of workers leveraged a tight labor market to secure better pay, perks, and positions. In this era of Zero Interest-Rate Policy (or ZIRP), easy money, particularly in the tech sector, led to salary inflation that has left a complex legacy, marked by subsequent layoffs and a reevaluation of compensation strategies across industries.

So many things have to go right for a startup to succeed. Product-market fit, funding, timing, product-development velocity, founding-team chemistry, and a little luck. 

These are all crucial success enablers, but every successful product or service company has one ingredient in common: talented people who bring it to life. 

Over my 25-year career in recruiting, I’ve seen many startups come and go, from the noun.com hiring bonanzas of Web 1.0 in the late ’90’s, to the rapid expansion and contraction we’ve seen over the past 24 months.