Russell Gammon, Chief Solutions Officer at Tax Systems, shares his thoughts.
The obvious answer to this question is, of course, AI – we can certainly expect to see more mainstream adoption of generative AI in 2025. However, it may not be immediately obvious within the tax and finance world.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when we will see mass adoption because the pace of change is so fast. For example, you could spend time building the best support agent using the OpenAI technology today, but a future model released just months later could come and outperform what you’ve built. Having said this, what we have now that we didn’t have 18 months ago is real use cases of how AI can be used in tax and finance. So, next year, we’ll see these being implemented and starting to generate true value. I believe the percentage of people using AI in their day job will more than double in 2025.
2025 will be the year of strategising, and figuring out where AI will fit within businesses. Business leaders will start to consider the blueprint for Artificial Intelligence within their workforces and decide on implementation strategies. For example, some businesses with developer capabilities in-house may consider using AI to create tailored systems for what they need, to save investing in entire enterprise systems and paying for included functions that aren’t utilised. In general, all companies will start to work out what processes and technology within their businesses could be improved with AI but the vast majority of businesses won’t begin implementing these changes within the next 12 months.
AI is not the only technology that will be shaping the finance industry in 2025, although it will help achieve a similar goal. The innovations and technologies that will shape the next year will be those that remove the need for manual work and solve industry challenges. As a result, we’ll see a decline in organisations manually using excel spreadsheets. Certain technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), automate repetitive, manual processes and will allow organisations to be rid of the grunt work that takes up a lot of finance professionals’ time. RPA is well used but only in a small pocket of the industry. In 2025, we can expect to see many companies – especially those smaller in size and without the in-house skills to implement AI – adopt RPA to improve workplace efficiency.