Microsoft: 81% of SMBs see 2025 as pivotal year for AI at work

People are overworked and under pressure to produce ever more, Microsoft’s new «2025 Work Trend Index» report finds.

Enter AI agents to alleviate the press, they say, and 79 % of leaders concur. Most are now planning to use AI to boost productivity within the next 12 to 18 months.

Using AI to compete
Already today, retention of AI talent is seen as one of the most important challenges in the global workplace, according to the report, and 81 % of SMB leaders see 2025 as a pivotal year for strategic transformation where they can use AI to compete with larger businesses and ramp up output without growing their headcount.

Some companies are already embracing it, leading the way in integrating AI, and this is what it looks like. Microsoft calls them the frontier firms:

Frontier workers are thriving—most say they can take on more work and find it meaningful. They’re also more optimistic about future opportunities. Their companies are even growing headcount by 20 %, twice the pace of Big Tech.

They also provide a blueprint for the future of work, as Microsoft describes in three phases.

Three phases of AI at work
The first is when every employee has an AI assistant to make work faster and better. The second is when agents join as «digital colleagues,» under human direction. And the third and final phase is when humans are leaders of entire agent-operated teams. They could handle end-to-end logistics, for example, while humans are mere guides.

Already, Microsoft’s report says, the most profound change in the workplace due to AI is that knowledge and intelligence is no longer a rare find, built up in the workforce over years and decades — it is now available on tap, like a commodity you can purchase.

This will have profound changes for how businesses prepare for, adapt to and change the future:

— As a result, a new organizational blueprint is emerging, one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led, the report says.

(The Work Trend Index survey was conducted among 31,000 full-time employed or self-employed knowledge workers across 31 markets, and enhanced by Microsoft 365 productivity signals.)

Read more: Micosoft’s report, the «2025 Work Trend Index», story on ZDNet, and a writeup at Fast Company, along with some buzzwords to check.