2025 Tech Trends: From Agentic AI to Quantum Computing

Uncover the technology trends that will define the year 2025, as we promise you a deep exploration into the future of artificial intelligence and beyond. Chris, our Chief Information Security Officer, and Martin, our Head of Cyber Security, guide us through the transformative journey of agentic AI, a groundbreaking technology that transcends traditional machine learning to serve as a digital assistant capable of complex problem-solving. As we dissect the possibilities and limitations of AI, you’ll gain insights into its role in sectors like sales and the critical need for verification to avoid misinformation.

Our conversation broadens to the realm of business and cybersecurity, where emerging technologies like quantum computing are making waves. Learn about the revolutionary impact quantum advancements have on cryptography and the urgent need for quantum-secure methods. With references to NVIDIA's strides in enhancing computing power, and a spotlight on the intriguing future of spatial computing, we underscore the importance of keeping pace with technological evolution to stay competitive in today’s fast-moving world.

Finally, we venture into the world of platform robots and neurological enhancements, exploring a future where technology significantly elevates quality of life. Discover the potential of robots beyond household chores, with ambitious goals of tackling complex tasks in industries like hospitality and aged care, particularly in Japan. Plus, we delve into the possibilities of rapid knowledge acquisition through neurological advancements, which could redefine education and healthcare, aiding individuals with conditions like dementia. This episode paints an optimistic vision of technology’s profound impact on human capabilities and well-being.

Chapters

• 0:00 Technology Trends for 2025
• 13:52 Emerging Technologies in Business
• 26:01 Future Trends in Technology
• 35:14 Business Policy and Insights Sharing

Transcript

Alisha Christian: 0:00

Welcome back to Tech Insights. Today we're going to dive straight into the hot topics of 2025. I'll have Chris and Martin joining me and to let you know, AI is definitely front and center, but hold out to the end because we have some exciting things to cover. I hope you enjoy the show Today. I have with me Chris, our Chief Information Security Officer, and Martin, our Head of Cyber Security. Thanks for joining me today.

Martin O'Riordan: 0:41

Of course.

Alisha Christian: 0:42

So today we're going to be talking about a pretty exciting topic technology trends for 2025. So there's a bit to cover here.

Martin O'Riordan: 0:51

A bit of ground there with trends.

Chris Haigh: 0:53

There are a few things, yes.

Martin O'Riordan: 0:54

And we probably should preface this and go. This is just kind of our view of what things are coming up, not necessarily exhaustive list. And just some of the kind of exciting trends that are coming up. Not necessarily exhaustive list and just some of the kind of exciting trends that are coming through.

Alisha Christian: 1:09

Yeah, well, there's certainly some interesting things on the list, that's for sure. So maybe we'll just kick off with agentic AI. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about that?

Chris Haigh: 1:18

Yeah, agentic AI. It's a relatively new term, that kind of popped up last year sometime, and it's around relatively new term that kind of popped up last year sometime and it's around agents and AI. So I think the conversation is actually more around AI and where that comes into play, how it's going to affect your business, should you be doing anything about it, etc. So I suppose we should start with. Maybe some of our listeners are thinking, okay, I've heard a bit about it, like kind of what is it what? You know? Where does it fit in? So I think we'll start there. So I think the first thing to note is artificial intelligence has been around for a very long time. I mean, the artificial intelligence term was coined in 1950, right, and you know, we had our first robotic arms created in like 1978, 79. We had Deep Blue that won the chess stuff from IBM. That was in the late 90s. In the late 2000s you had IBM again with Watson, and Watson was kind of one of the first that could take a natural language and answer questions so not quite a chat bot, but kind of similar getting there and then, of course, chat GPT in 2022. So that's that's where it, you know, got a huge public interest and started pushing a lot harder on on what it could actually do. Now, um, a lot of people go, okay, but what is artificial intelligence? Because a lot of people go well, it's not specifically artificial intelligence, is it? It's like it's. It's kind of machine learning, isn't it? And yes and no, I think the differences starts coming in where you go. Machine learning, um, has again, it's another scientific data area that is a little different from AI. When you start looking at terms and definitions of AI, a lot of what comes out of that is talking about a system being able to again using algorithms and data sets. So it's still an element of machine learning. That's there, but it's being able to then generalize that stuff, rationalize it right and then apply a thought process and these days, quite often an iterative thought process around what it's trying to do, like whether it's a question or something. So it could literally now go backwards and forwards, even with a human, iteratively through a thought process. So that's kind of where it is, which is pretty interesting.

Chris Haigh: 3:59

Going forward, though, where we start talking agentic AI, now we're talking agents. So it's like having a almost like an assistant, let's say that's got a particular task, that it can go and do, right, and you could have a number of assistants so you could. There's a number of platforms out there that will allow you to combine these agents together and they can actually act as an application, right, so I can go and get it to go and do stuff for me. An example would be like if you take something like sales and I need to approach, let's say, a prospect, I could get an agent to go and do the research like go and look on the internet for me, because that would take you hours and hours, if not days, of work to go and find their latest financial records.

Chris Haigh: 4:49

What have they done in the last year? What's important to them, what do they mean, who their important people and decision makers are of the business. This will all go happen in minutes or seconds, right. Pull it all back in a report for you. You can have another agent take that report right and kind of work out sentiment around that and produce an opening like email, right. So if you had to do like a cold call to this business, you would be using words and sentiment that they use. You know in about their business and who the important people are. You can put all of that in there For you to have done that. Research as a salesperson is taking you weeks, right, and if I want to build a list of, like my top 100 prospects, that's going to take a long time. So this could actually go out there and do all of that for you. So that's where I mean that's one use case.

Martin O'Riordan: 5:44

And also very, very, very long answer for agentic AI.

Chris Haigh: 5:47

But you can kind of. There's a lot to it.

Alisha Christian: 5:51

I mean the advancement's just amazing and the time-saving for businesses. I mean, I'm pretty sure the sales team here would be happy with that.

Chris Haigh: 5:57

Absolutely. I mean and don't get me wrong like a lot of people go like, oh yeah, but it's like often AI is wrong. Yes, it is. There's a name for it. It's called hallucinations, so I can't remember the exact percentages, but it's something like 20% of the output is made up. It's hallucinated. So, and that's why you'll see the messages at the bottom, if you use chat, gpt, it make sure you check, you know the output and you'll see.

Chris Haigh: 6:26

And martin will come in with policy for business whereby if, uh, you know your users and your workers and that are using ai to produce work right, it's your responsibility to check the output right. But again, you, you can even get AI to do that, which is really interesting because you're going like hold on a second. So, where I spoke about different agents, where I'll go back to that example, it does all the research for me. So it goes and does scraping off websites and gets all that data, produces a report around the sentiment and so forth. I could then pass it to another agent in a totally different model. So, let's say I'm using OpenAI, I could then go and use Claude or a different model to then check the work and see hold on a second, that sounds completely incorrect and then iteratively pass it back and go rewrite it. It's wrong, right, and then produce an output. So there's ways that you can improve the accuracy and the efficacy of what you're actually producing.

Alisha Christian: 7:31

It's almost like a second opinion, it is.

Chris Haigh: 7:34

But at the end of the day, the human is responsible and we're not going to get around that. A lot of people go like, oh, we're going to lose our jobs. It's like if you don't learn AI or use AI to improve your work performance and output and the same, I'll apply this to business. Right then, yes, you could very well lose that job, or you're going to lose customers or market share customers or market share. So you know, if you come back to a company and go, is it worth me looking into AI? Yes, you absolutely need to look into it. Is it right for your business? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

Alisha Christian: 8:14

That's a case by case, I guess, isn't it? There's a lot of yes cases there.

Chris Haigh: 8:17

So the chances are yes. There could be elements of the business that it could definitely help and you should be looking, but is it helping enough that it's either saving you money or keeping your market share or growing your business? So is it doing what you want it to do for your business? If it is, you should be looking into it.

Martin O'Riordan: 8:35

If it doesn't really do anything for you, then fair enough you know, maybe it's not for you I think it's probably important to kind of note that even if the business is not even looking at it, your staff probably are.

Martin O'Riordan: 8:48

So your staff probably are already using it in some form, or some of them will be, and so it probably does make a lot of sense to be trying to do that from an organizational perspective, not just let everyone do shadow IT and start using whatever AI version they want to use to help them do their job. So, especially if you're running it from the business, you could put some policy and controls around it and you can say what AI is able to be used within the business. You can turn around and say what percentage of work you expect to be still done by a human, et cetera, and how that is actually going to work from a perspective of ensuring the quality of the work.

Alisha Christian: 9:30

Yeah, well, I guess it gives you more control over it, doesn't it, rather than everyone just yeah off doing their own thing.

Martin O'Riordan: 9:35

Yeah, it's kind of like when social media first started and people, businesses went no, we're locking it down, there's no social media. And then it all got away from them because everyone was already using it. So they kind of had to chase themselves to catch up, to try and see how they could use it in their own business. Absolutely it's like that with AI. I think that better to be on the front foot and start putting your own policies and processes in place rather than just letting everyone go off and do their own thing.

Chris Haigh: 10:02

And it segues well into cyber security.

Chris Haigh: 10:06

Uh, I'm just being from the cyber security side of things if you, like martin said, if you don't have policy around it, your users are already using it. So the there's massive concerns around that uh that a lot of businesses are not necessarily thinking about or aware of, and that is if they're using free versions of AI, even something like ChatGPT, but it could be others. It is taking the data that you're putting in there and then training or retraining the model on that data, which means if you're putting private data, company data in there or heaven forbid, your customer data in there, it's out in the public. Now, fair enough, it's not directly accessible or anything like that, but it could leak absolutely. So you'd rather have paid for versions like, like if you're a Microsoft house, you use Microsoft 365, using something like Copilot is going to make that a bit more secure.

Chris Haigh: 11:12

Again, I am not saying it's secure. You can't just switch something on and go. We use this, it's secure. It doesn't work like that. You still, there's lots to do to make sure it's secure, but it is going to be more secure than the free tools, and I will mention that there are definitely going to be attack vectors coming out via probably something like phishing, where it's like hey, this new amazing AI tool. Click here, get free access, cause. What are your staff doing Clicking through? And it is it's AI that a hacker has built and it works exactly like ChatGPT. It provides all the answers. It's amazing. What's the hacker getting out of it? All your data? Yeah, so, and you don't have a policy around it. You're not trying to technically stop it with tools and that is hard to do as well but those conversations need to be had.

Martin O'Riordan: 12:08

Because we do know who is using AI Hackers.

Alisha Christian: 12:12

Yeah, I guess that kind of leads us into one of the other topics that we talked about, which is the governance AI platforms, martin, this one probably sounds a bit more.

Martin O'Riordan: 12:22

Well, this is sort of coming up as a trend is working out how you can control what is being done on AI within businesses or within government, and it is certainly going to be more of a trend, and there are certainly people out there trying to build platforms that will do that work for you. As Chris said, ai can check AI, so how do you have a platform that can do that work for you? As Chris said, ai can check AI, so how do you have a platform that can do that with reliability? So those sorts of things are going to be coming within the next 12 months is having sort of paid-for versions of quality assurance processes to be put in place to try and check some of that data and putting that governance in around making sure that what you say is accurate, because I think one of the other trends that we might touch on is like misinformation and disinformation and being able to work out what is true or what is truth, and that's a subjective thing as well, because we know that governments have been trying to do that.

Martin O'Riordan: 13:24

The UK put in place a bill that says that misinformation is now illegal, but who decides what's misinformation? So having some kind of more robust method of defining what is true or accurate maybe is a better word is going to be something that needs to kind of get a little bit more traction out in the cyber world Agreed.

Chris Haigh: 13:52

I think some of the tips here from a business perspective is absolutely go look into AI. You should be right. Maybe go and interview some of your staff on what's actually being used, because they've probably got some very good use cases that you can immediately use and get some productivity out of it. Definitely have a policy around it, right? There are some basic template policies. Go and search, go and ask AI, it will give you an.

Chris Haigh: 14:22

AR policy, but have something there that is making sure people are accountable for the work output, so that you've got some of your risks covered. Making sure staff know not to use a free version of anything or to go and request access to co-pilots or request access to a paid version of chat, gpt or whatever they want to use, and if you're going to allow it, of course. But that that's some of the tips that you need to to look at. And, just as martin said, around misinformation, disinformation, again, making sure everybody's double checking that information so it comes down to like um, is there a big emotional response attached to what you're seeing is quite often um, disinformation that's coming out or misinformation. So definitely look at that.

Chris Haigh: 15:17

Social media is absolutely terrible for it because it can spread it so quickly you know, and you only have to look back to what like 2016, when you started massive misinformation, disinformation campaigns around the elections in the in the us is kind of where it started, but now you're looking at things like open ai producing dali, which can produce images that are amazing, and then you've got ones that have gone beyond that producing video. You only need a bit of a snippet like this podcast for someone to make a video of any one of us three saying anything they want yes fun times yeah, I mean technology is amazing, it's advancement.

Alisha Christian: 15:59

Yeah, I mean they might struggle with my accent, but you know, maybe so one of the other topics that we chatted about was, uh, quantum computing. So I'm not sure if you want to touch on that briefly today martin's favorite topic.

Martin O'Riordan: 16:15

He loves it well, actually it's not really just a trend for 2025. It's actually been developed for a number of years now. I think probably what's getting a bit more traction is that it's starting to get closer to being sort of real world cases and being able to put that into a, you know, a real use case. But you know, quantum computing is is kind of a very cool space, I mean, and and it's just very, very high level.

Martin O'Riordan: 16:43

We don't want to bore everyone, but most computing at the moment is all very binary, so it's ones and zeros, so it's on off, whereas quantum computing, the uh, actual processing can happen in more than those two states, so it can be happening in three states at the same time. So it does speed up processing. And, from a cybersecurity perspective, one of the scary things from some of the quantum computing research and experiments that have been going on is that the ability for a quantum computer to break very, very strong cryptography very quickly. Whereas normal computing might take 1,000 years to break a cryptograph, the quantum computers can do it in minutes. So we're talking something that will fundamentally change how we secure things in the future, because when we start getting more powerful computing, we start to need more powerful security in place, absolutely.

Alisha Christian: 17:46

You're going to be busy.

Martin O'Riordan: 17:47

Well, it's not.

Chris Haigh: 17:48

Look, no one's sitting on their laurels, though, either. So there's already designs for quantum, secure cryptography. So there's two designs that have been put forward, and there's more than just the two, but there were two that were put forward to the US government, you know, to have a look at as well. So people are thinking about it. Okay, what happens when quantum becomes a thing? We will absolutely need different cryptography methods, but they are being worked on, luckily. So it's not just one day all cryptography is broken, luckily, but it could be interesting when it does happen. So quantum is a very interesting topic and where it's going.

Chris Haigh: 18:37

But it's kind of similar to looking at just computing and going back to AI as an example. If you look at ChatGPT, it's got a number of variables that it works with, or computing points, let's say, and it's got a huge amount of those points like 200 billion points for its model. But if you have a look at, you know NVIDIA. Nvidia is bringing out chips that can run that entire model on a single chip. So when you talk about, like you need data centers, you know with OpenAI, microsoft, google, facebook, like those, like meta, those are the big ones that have all the data center computing power, and Nvidia is coming out and going. You can buy a, you know a computer like this big that can literally run a model double the size of chat GPT on a on a local device. So it's not quite quantum. It's interesting. If you add quantum to that, where is it actually going to go?

Chris Haigh: 19:43

gosh, so many interesting things happening in this space and it's fast like the number of like iterations of ai or iterations of chips and stuff that's coming out is it's like normally you'd wait, like it. You know it's a year or two for things to come out. It's now like every other week you're reading about the next thing that's coming.

Alisha Christian: 20:06

Yeah, it's hard to keep up, that's for sure, absolutely.

Martin O'Riordan: 20:09

The government has actually stumped up a lot of cash now for the quantum computing as well.

Alisha Christian: 20:14

Ah, interesting, so a good space to watch then.

Martin O'Riordan: 20:16

Well, it's a good space for at least Australia to be involved in, because you don't want to be left behind with the rest of the world going ahead and us being left in the dark ages. Agreed.

Alisha Christian: 20:29

That's true. So the next thing is spatial computing. Well this is actually Sounds pretty interesting.

Martin O'Riordan: 20:36

It is very interesting, and people probably may not realise that they're already doing some of these things. So, virtual reality so any of those gaming headsets and those virtual reality glasses is that spatial computing space, and we have seen also, like meta, have those glasses that you can put on and you can capture video and things in real time. Where this is going, though, what's really very cool is that you start to change the way that you interact with computers, so it's got the potential to completely change the landscape of our offices, where you may not have monitors on desks and all of your actual screen space know, screen space is is in a glasses that you wear, and, uh, that kind of changes, um, a bit of the the whole office environment.

Martin O'Riordan: 21:29

Well, it certainly does a wee bit more space uh and some of the other things that it's doing, and chris actually sort of touched on this one is the fact that you can do remote surgery. So doctors are actually, uh, like specialist surgeons can be in another city doing surgery on on a patient um in, say, a remote area it's so it's very, very cool, so they're actually using.

Martin O'Riordan: 21:54

Well, it's a blend, then, so there's more robotics as well. So you've got actual robotic tools on the other end, using spatial glasses or a virtual reality headset, uh, to to see what's going on and manipulate. Manipulating, uh, actual surgical tools from thousands of kilometers away. I mean, the precision is insane.

Chris Haigh: 22:16

So it's quite interesting to think how that even works. So I think one of the robotic surgical machines called DaVinci and it's just unbelievable to be able to control that at distance and then do something like fine stitching of a heart valve is just mind-blowing. But the glasses you get cybersecurity.

Martin O'Riordan: 22:37

Back to cybersecurity.

Alisha Christian: 22:39

It's not all about you, chris?

Chris Haigh: 22:40

um, looking at the glasses, like you know, google glass came out ages ago, right, years and years ago, but now because of ai, they implementing. I remember I said you you've got agents that can go and do the research for you and that now what you've got is these glasses. It could be walking down the street you see a person's face, right, not, so, not you, specifically, the glasses is. Imaging the person going and doing a search, finding their linkedin profile, pulling back, who they are, who they work for, etc. So you could walk up to a total stranger and go john, he's like's like. Yeah, john, you know, blah, you went for so-and-so. Yeah, yeah, it's like. Oh, I love what you did last week on da-da-da-da-da. It's a little weird. Right, that is a little weird.

Alisha Christian: 23:29

Put a new spin on dating, wouldn't it?

Chris Haigh: 23:32

That's just horrifying.

Alisha Christian: 23:36

That is pretty horrifying.

Martin O'Riordan: 23:42

So that's where the sort of stuff is going as well. Very, it's very interesting and it's certainly it's certainly taking off in the gaming world, so that virtual reality gaming is is becoming very big business. So, um, you can see that there's going to be real world use cases as well, like I mentioned. Uh, the warehouse where your warehouse worker can be wearing the glasses, so instead of having to scan barcodes of the stock that they're pulling off a shelf to go and ship that somewhere, the glasses is actually recording first of all, tells them where in the warehouse it is, can tell what that particular parcel is, can do all of the actual processing of it print out the labels, they stick it on away, they go, and it just improves efficiency across that warehouse quite a lot. As Chris said, that's right up until a robot replaces that person.

Alisha Christian: 24:33

Yes, yes.

Martin O'Riordan: 24:35

But in that interim, that they will be.

Alisha Christian: 24:39

Yeah, the time-saving and efficiency is pretty amazing.

Chris Haigh: 24:43

Yeah, it is interesting, that's for sure.

Alisha Christian: 24:45

Speaking of robots, I'm probably going to get this one wrong. It's a bit of a mouthful, but tell us a little bit more about polyfunctional robots. No, you got that right.

Martin O'Riordan: 24:54

Well, it's something that when robots were first being played with, which was to have robots that were like humans, which was the real goal which could do many, many things. What we did see, though, the reality of robotics were robots that were very specifically designed for individual tasks, so some of the early ones were welding robots, in car manufacturing and spray painting robots. They did one job very, very well, but they couldn't do more than one job, so it was kind of quite difficult, but now we are in a space there's been a lot of work done on some of those military robots that look like dogs.

Alisha Christian: 25:32

Yeah.

Martin O'Riordan: 25:34

And they're kind of more of a platform robot, so they can be tasked with things like carrying a gun, but they do things like surveillance, or they can be doing reconnaissance work. But also those same particular robots now have been trained how to do search and rescue in, like, if there's been an earthquake, firefighting as well.

Chris Haigh: 25:58

Firefighting too. They're great.

Martin O'Riordan: 26:01

So we're talking platform robots, where you have a base robot that can do more than one thing, but then we are already seeing some of these in real life. So some of the you know a lot of people these days have the vacuum robots running around their house. Yes, and then you might have a mopping robot as well, and we've already started to see those ones that will do both A bit of multitasking Multitasking.

Martin O'Riordan: 26:26

But that's still very basic versions of it. What we're starting to look at, and some of the holy grails, are things like can you get a robot to go and clean a hotel room? And you think of all the tasks that you need to do in that. So you have to, you know, make. You know strip a bed, make a bed, clean a shower, pick up towels off the floor, you know vacuum the floor. So that process and we're not talking a robot that looks like a human. That's not what they're talking about it's. It's a robot that's very functional, and I did see there's been quite a lot of work about getting a robot to fold a towel that's been left in any sort of any shape.

Martin O'Riordan: 27:07

So if you left the towel flat, you can train a robot very quickly to fold it, but when it's been chucked on a floor in so many different versions like it's probably an infinite number of versions of how a towel could be dropped on a floor to have a robot be able to pick that up, spread it out and then fold it perfectly. So some of those things are starting to really make a lot of traction now and and it's quite an exciting space again we're not going to see human robots running around any time really soon. We see more of it. Definitely there's some up for sale, but those actual functional work robots we're going to see a lot more of coming up A big area that they're looking at is aged care actually.

Chris Haigh: 27:56

So where it might look more like human, where it can help someone out of a chair, for instance, if they need help, walk them down a corridor to go and get a meal could potentially feed them. But then it does look like a human and it is using AIs to then also have that bond.

Chris Haigh: 28:16

So to chat to that person because there's going to be a lot of elderly people that their family unfortunately doesn't visit them, so they're looking at a lot of that. I know Japan is specifically looking at a lot of that because it's an ageing population.

Alisha Christian: 28:35

That's pretty incredible. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's an aging population, so that's pretty incredible. Yeah, it's interesting, yeah, uh. So the last thing on the list is maybe a little bit further than 2025, but it's a pretty exciting topic too, so we'll let you touch on that. Martin, neurological neurological enhancement.

Martin O'Riordan: 28:52

It's uh, that's a a really good area. So I mean, immediately you start thinking of the matrix and getting you know jacked in.

Alisha Christian: 29:01

I feel like your excitement went up a little bit.

Martin O'Riordan: 29:03

Yeah, I mean, that is actually quite exciting. And the Holy Grail is being able to implant information very quickly. So education is kind of a big space for that. So being able to I'm going to visit spain so I upload spanish, uh immediately, would you know? That's. That's kind of the holy grail. But the the more short-term realities are going to be things like being able to help people with dementia and, uh, with parkinson's and these sorts of things. So where you're having a, an actual link between the biological side of your brain and some kind of device, and that work is actually progressing quite a lot faster than people probably expected.

Alisha Christian: 29:46

I mean, that's pretty special, using it for good, not evil.

Martin O'Riordan: 29:49

Well, yeah, I mean, we can always find the evil ways of using it. I'm sure there's going to be plenty, but as with everything.

Martin O'Riordan: 29:57

That bridging that technological gap is going to be quite an interesting space, and I mentioned that spatial computing changes the landscape. This changes it even further because what you project forward, you can end up with a scenario where your interaction with some kind of computing or AI or your assistant is there is no device. You're not wearing glasses, you're not doing any of that, it's actually all a thought, a mere thought, so that kind of thing, is well, it can terrify some people.

Martin O'Riordan: 30:35

I'm not sure I'm lining up to be one of the first people. You don't want to be the test bunny.

Chris Haigh: 30:39

No, I don't think I'll be lining up that way.

Martin O'Riordan: 30:42

But I think that it has really wide-ranging implications for humanity. I think this is one of those moments, kind of like you know, when the industrial revolution through to transistors and, you know, home computers, the internet, ai this is one of those moments where, when this starts to really be mainstream, it's going to be one of those next revolutions in human evolution because it will be a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology.

Alisha Christian: 31:17

Yeah.

Chris Haigh: 31:18

And all the first ones. Like you're talking about being a test bunny and that the the first sort of test cases are the ones that um have got a lot to gain so it will be uh, I know a lot of uh from a disability perspective, that is, you know, restoring the function of your hand. You know, because your, you know your your brain's not sending the signals correctly and then being able to alter that or restoring sight or hearing.

Alisha Christian: 31:45

I mean life-changing.

Chris Haigh: 31:46

Yeah, there's huge, huge things and again, you're reading about these sorts of things all the time. So it's not quite directly linked to the Neuralink type stuff, but similar.

Martin O'Riordan: 31:59

But it's one of those things where I know we get excited about technology. It's where you see technology changing people's lives yeah and that that's the exciting part it's. It's certainly uh a good space to be in.

Alisha Christian: 32:13

I think, yeah, well I'll definitely be interested to watch that space, but I also won't be signing up to be the uh test bunny. Wait till you get some of those bugs ironed out.

Chris Haigh: 32:22

Wait till the first hack of the human brain happens.

Alisha Christian: 32:28

That's probably a good note to finish on, unless either of you have any other trends that you see coming through that you might like to share.

Martin O'Riordan: 32:36

Well, I think, when we talk about trends in 2025, I think a lot of the ones we talk about have been trends for a while and they're going to extend a lot longer than 2025. That's for sure. I think that probably, out of all of that list, if I had to pick one, that's going to be the one spoken about most this year would probably be the agentic AI.

Chris Haigh: 32:57

Yeah.

Martin O'Riordan: 32:58

I think that that's kind of that next iteration of where AI is going, so it's being able to have more real world use cases for it. You know, when it sort of started to get a lot of traction in a few years ago, it was kind of a bit of a novelty type scenario and people are now starting to see oh, actually, this has some real-world application, it actually can help my business, it can help me personally. It doesn't necessarily need to replace me, but it can help me do my job better and faster and faster.

Chris Haigh: 33:32

Even if it's helping with elements of it right, like decision-making, because you're not 100% sure, if you're not an expert on a particular area, but you need a bit of information about it. You could jump onto your favorite AI and go hey, tell me a bit about blah or what are the good use cases for X, and it would produce it right Again, with the caveat that it could be wrong. So double check your stuff, but that's very useful.

Chris Haigh: 34:01

Or tell me the differences between this and this well I'm thinking about purchasing this, like what are some of the options? If my budget is x, it will go and do that research for you. It speeds it up a little bit again, don't take it straight up, but it's part of that decision making process so you can definitely use it and it's it's great. You know, even like if you talk about personal life, it's just like oh, I can't think about what to do for dinner. It's like give me a meal plan for you know. It's like low carbohydrate, high protein for the week.

Alisha Christian: 34:29

Well, I haven't used it for that. Maybe I should give that a go.

Chris Haigh: 34:33

I use it maybe more often than I care to admit.

Martin O'Riordan: 34:38

But it certainly does change how people approach in business. So one of those things that you kind of get a lot oh, I need a new policy written for this. I don't even know where to start. I'll have to try and Google something and try and work something out. Having somewhere to start some of these things is actually a good place. Being able to give you a oh, I need, um, you know, a plan of something. Can you give me an outline of a plan?

Alisha Christian: 35:05

it's a good way of doing. It's definitely a bit of a prompt to get you, so, instead of going, write me a policy on this.

Chris Haigh: 35:12

It's going. What are the things I need to think about? For a policy around this, exactly yeah then at least you can provide some of your thought and input for your specific business against that, and that is very, very powerful.

Alisha Christian: 35:25

Very helpful tool.

Martin O'Riordan: 35:27

It will be and that's where I think we get excited about it is that you can start to see the potential.

Alisha Christian: 35:34

Yes.

Martin O'Riordan: 35:35

For sure.

Alisha Christian: 35:36

Well, thanks for joining me today. Of course, and thanks for sharing your insights and if people want to reach out to either of you, chris, linkedin Christopher.

Chris Haigh: 35:45

Yes, and.

Alisha Christian: 35:47

Martin, not so much on the LinkedIn probably by the website.

Martin O'Riordan: 35:50

Yes, that would be great.

Alisha Christian: 35:52

Awesome. Well, thanks again.

Martin O'Riordan: 35:53

Thank you, thank you.