Important points of ZDNET
- Gartner has released its 2025 Hype Cycle Report.
- AI agents and data are the most inflated and require accurate applications to get results.
- The report also highlighted its trust and safety efforts as important over the next five years.
Research firm Gartner has released its annual Hype Cycle Report. This is examining whether new technologies are meeting expectations or far from meaningful impact. At the top of this year's list? AI agent.
This report comes when tech companies make big promises about AI capabilities and the extent to which they will become entrenched in our daily lives, both at home and at work.
Gartner has appointed four major technologies, called Agents, AI-enabled data, multimodal AI, and “AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (TRISM).” Let's break down what we're talking about about each one.
AI Agent and AI-enabled data
AI agents refer to increasingly autonomous systems that can perform human tasks with little or no intervention ideally. However, the easiest way to function like a standard chatbot or assistant. “Agent” remains a very broadly defined word. So, what an agent actually does is very different in terms of refinement and application.
Also: AI agents are around, but not autonomous – what does that mean for us
AI is just as good as accessible data. AI-enabled data is information that is properly configured to be ingested by AI tools and is optimized for efficiency and accuracy. Unlike the other three technologies that focused on Gartner's report, the company said that AI Ready data has a slightly longer timeline for the 5-10-year plateau, compared to the other 2-5-year timeline. Graph's productivity plateau refers to the point where technology proves practical use and market appeal.
Gartner admitted that these two technologies are the fastest-tracking techniques, but “place at the peak of expectations with ambitious predictions and speculative promises,” or whether productive applications come true or not.”
Haritha Khandabattu, senior director analyst at Gartner, said that as AI Investments is consistent this year, companies are looking for “operability scalability and real-time intelligence.” “This has slowly resulted in a pivot from Generated AI (Genai) as a central focus on the basic enabler supporting sustainable AI delivery.”
Also: 5 ways to integrate AI agents into your workplace
As a result, more concrete results are needed to meet the big promises. Like most AI applications, Gartner said that in order to use agents and data effectively, companies need to consider where they can actually strategically support them, rather than blindly apply them to the entire organization.
“To enjoy the benefits of AI agents, organizations need to determine the most relevant business context and use cases, which is difficult given that AI agents are the same and all situations are different,” Khandabattu said in the report. “AI agents continue to be more powerful, but they cannot be used in all cases. Therefore, their use is heavily dependent on the requirements of the situation at hand.”
When it comes to data, Gartner said it is as effective as a company's approach to data management. Simply having data is not enough. The report encouraged organizations not to underestimate the amount needed to evolve data management to meet AI requirements.
“This will meet existing and upcoming business demands, ensure trust, avoid risk and compliance issues, maintain intellectual property, and reduce bias and hallucinations,” the report states.
Multimodal AI and Trim
Gartner said that despite “dominating a bulging peak of expectations,” multimodal AI and risk management infrastructures are also promised with less warnings. Both will be adopted mainstream over the next five years, “enablering more robust, innovative and responsible AI applications and transforming the way businesses and organizations operate.”
Multimodal AI is trained to output multiple types of data, including audio, text, images, and video. This creates more context than just the text model. Gartner said it will open a new application for AI.
Also: 5 ways to integrate AI agents into your workplace
On the safety side, Gartner's report stated that AI Trim is central to using AI in a safe and ethical way. The rapid evolution of AI is rapidly emerging new security and ethical issues. To advance AI applications properly, “AI poses new trust, risk and security management challenges that traditional controls don't address,” says Khandabattu. “Organisations need to evaluate and implement layered AI TRISM technology to continuously support and enforce policies across all entities in use.”
Valley of Disillusionment
This year's report noted that some areas of AI have slipped into the Valley of Disillusionment or that technology has slipped into a period of time when it fails to reach the high expectations set in the inflation phase. The report lists synthetic data and generic ones in this section of the Hype Cycle Graph, each of which will become more popular in about 2-5 years.
