Regardless of how you feel about artificial intelligence (AI), it's becoming increasingly clear that AI agents are not just some far-off fantasy anymore, as they are going to be your future office colleagues—or so is the thrust of Microsoft's latest report. According to Microsoft's 2025 Annual Work Trend Index report, AI agents will soon be ubiquitously embedded in organisations and work collaboratively with humans to accomplish daily tasks, automate workflows, and fundamentally change the way organisations work. Microsoft describes this change as comparable to the Industrial Revolution or the internet, saying, businesses are entering an era of "intelligence on tap" – scalable and abundant AI that organisations can leverage to address the increasing gap between demand and human capacity.

The report indicates that 82 percent of business leaders believe 2025 is a pivotal year for them to decide and plan how they want to set up their workforce and operations. As it stands now, reportedly 46 percent of organisations are already using AI to autonomously or fully automate parts of a business-across various functions, like customer service, marketing and product design and development. Microsoft also predicts the upcoming emergence of the agent boss – a role whereby employees can oversee and direct AI agents to perform tasks more effectively.

In a blog post published earlier this year, Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI said, “We believe that in 2025 we may see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of companies.” He described AI agents as autonomous systems that won’t just write code but could also test, validate, and integrate it — doing the work of a mid-level software engineer.

Altman has also suggested even more sophisticated systems that he called "superintelligence" that would be able to push for scientific breakthroughs far beyond our wildest dreams.

Altman has even mentioned there are companies using AI to write 50 per cent of the code. Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, founder and CEO of Anthropic, recently made a prediction that “AI will generate 90 to 100 per cent of all code by the end of 2025”.

That said the rise of AI agents brings up very real questions around the future of human work. Microsoft focuses heavily on AI as a tech to advanced human productivity – with 83 per cent of leaders believing AI will allow employees to take a more strategic role to decision making – whilst also indicating 33 per cent of leaders were seeing layoffs in their future even higher 78 per cent were looking to hire related to some kind of integration of AI.

Altman didn’t speak to the potential for lay offs. His ambition – to imagine a world with "a million" of AI agents operating in various disciplines – indicates some seismic behaviour may be on the horizon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed by way of an announcement they are actively using AI to replace mid-level engineers at Meta. “We will get to a point where all the code in our apps will be written by AI engineers instead of people engineers,” he said.