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In 2025, HR leaders will face an increasingly volatile landscape as macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties persist. The lingering effects of inflation, global conflicts and supply chain disruptions will continue to shape the workforce, while rapid technological advancements—particularly in AI—introduce both opportunities and challenges. Amid this disruption, the pressure to attract, retain and engage top talent has never been greater.
Drawing from our insights and conversations with HR leaders across our global customer base spanning multiple industries, Avature’s CEO Dimitri Boylan shares his forecast for the HR trends of 2025. From navigating the disruptive potential of AI to fostering agility and delivering hyper-personalized experiences, these trends equip HR leaders with the insights needed to start laying the blueprint for resilience and success in the year ahead.
HR Trend 1: Moving from ChatGPT to Something Meaningful
In 2024, AI sparked imaginations. In 2025, it will begin to disrupt HR in earnest and the search for sustainable competitive advantage will begin. However, this won’t be the year of clear winners and losers. Instead, most organizations will channel their intellectual capital into crafting coherent AI visions, with a few succeeding in embedding AI into their operating models and HR strategies. Most, however, will experiment, deploying AI features across applications without a cohesive plan.
Integrating this fragmented AI adoption into a strategic framework will present a significant challenge for HR. With three in four knowledge workers already using AI tools at work – 78 percent of them without any official guidance or oversight – it will fall to HR to map out where artificial intelligence is being used, assess its value and determine if and how it aligns with organizational goals.
Leaders, in turn, will keep a close eye on industry trends, searching for ways to leverage AI to create sustainable competitive advantages. While detailed roadmaps may still be scarce, sound ideas will begin to take shape. Organizations that avoid the trap of “AI for AI’s sake” and instead adopt intelligent, socially responsible and agile systems will be better positioned for long-term success.
The Avature platform is designed for enterprise agility. The objective is to allow the system to change so that it always remains fit for purpose. If the system fails to evolve, even powerful capabilities like AI will not make a difference because the system will be doing the wrong things.”
Dimitri Boylan,
Avature Founder and CEO
Artificial intelligence is already automating routine HR tasks, such as generating job suggestions on career pages. These applications span a spectrum from non-controversial features like AI-powered job matching to more sensitive and complex use cases. In 2025, most big brands will likely focus on expanding low-risk, value-added features as they build confidence in AI’s capabilities.
In order to tread the thin line between risk and opportunity that AI creates, HR will play an instrumental role when it comes to transparently communicating AI’s purpose and potential. Employees must view AI as a tool for growth — not a threat to their roles — supported by clear policies and open dialogue about its impact.
To enable safe experimentation and ethical implementation, HR, Legal and IT will need to collaborate to establish robust guardrails. Organizations will also demand greater transparency from vendors, asking critical questions about AI models, their contexts and quality metrics. However, adoption will be slowed by familiar barriers: regulatory challenges, technical complexities, a lack of vision and siloed communication between key stakeholders.
There are a lot of guardrails and guidelines that we’re putting in place around AI, just to make sure that we’re legally compliant, to make sure that we’re not letting it make decisions for us.”
Erica Rutherford,
Director of Technology at Bain & Company
HR Trend 2: The Rise of Agentic AI
2024 marked the emergence of agentic AI — intelligent agents capable of understanding context, making decisions, and taking meaningful action. In 2025, however, agentic AI will truly take center stage, moving from promising innovation to a transformative force in HR. Unlike traditional AI tools that merely assist with tasks, these agents operate as autonomous workers, marking a new frontier in HR technology.
According to a recent Gartner report, 33 percent of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than one percent in 2024, enabling 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. By collaborating across specialized domains, multiple agents can assist talent teams in supercharging their efficiency and productivity.
Beyond freeing up time to focus on high-value, strategic activities, AI agents will also enable HR to explore new frontiers, tackling tasks once considered out of reach due to time, complexity or resource constraints.
For example, one agent could analyze workforce data to identify skills gaps, while another designs personalized training programs to address those gaps, and a third schedules learning and development sessions and monitors employee progress.
However, realizing the full potential of agentic AI requires HR professionals to deepen their understanding of this emerging technology, including its potential impact on the workforce and potential ethical considerations.
Aside from increasing AI literacy, HR teams can already explore suitable, low-risk areas to add agentic AI to their technology stack. For instance, Avature Copilot, is an easy-to-use intelligent assistant that interprets a user’s written request based on context to deploy the best agent for the use case, whether that’s writing a job description, providing information based on data in your system or creating code.
For those who embrace agentic AI with care and vision, 2025 could be the start of a transformative journey, turning AI from a tool into a partner.
HR Trend 3: The Role of HR Will Continue to Become More Strategic
The role of HR is undergoing a significant transformation as organizations redefine their priorities in a post-pandemic world. 65 percent of respondents in our recent HR survey reported that HR’s role has significantly changed in recent years. This shift is driven by leaders both within and outside HR advocating for a more strategic function that can address workforce dynamics reshaped by AI and other emerging technologies.
Survey findings reveal the top priorities for HR leaders aiming for future success:
- 63 percent emphasized the importance of using data to make smarter HR decisions.
- 43 percent highlighted the need to better align HR strategies with business goals.
- 42 percent recognized the need to enhance HR’s capability to adopt, utilize and manage next-generation technology effectively.
While HR teams have been diversifying their skill sets for some time, we expect this trend to accelerate in 2025. Organizations will increasingly recruit talent with non-traditional backgrounds, such as data analytics, product management or technology, to address complex challenges with fresh perspectives. This shift underscores a growing recognition that HR’s value lies in shaping strategy, driving innovation and ensuring that technologies like AI align with both business goals and employee needs.
By further broadening the skills and experiences within HR teams, companies can position HR as a true strategic partner, capable of navigating the complexities of a rapidly changing world and driving long-term success.
HR Trend 4: The Pressing Need for Enterprise Agility
In 2025, the rapid pace of technological change, evolving employee expectations and global challenges will continue to cement agility a critical cornerstone of resilience and competitiveness.
On a macro level, organizations will have to adapt swiftly to shifting market dynamics, regulatory landscapes and emerging technologies, with HR playing a crucial role. HR teams will need to reimagine workflows, policies and processes to meet evolving business needs. In response, we foresee increased demand for user-configurable, fit-for-purpose platforms that empower teams to adapt swiftly without needing extensive IT or vendor involvement.
In this context, Avature has developed powerful builders that grant users unprecedented autonomy. For example, Junction, our integrations builder, will enable technical users to manage integrations independently and through our Portal Apps Builder, users can create any kind of portal they need from scratch.
On a micro level, agility must also be cultivated as a core workforce skill, with forward-thinking HR teams prioritizing its development to help employees thrive in a constantly changing environment.
HR Trend 5: The Need for Upskilling and Reskilling Intensifies
Beyond agility, the ability to continuously upskill and reskill is becoming a defining factor for workforce success. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, employers estimate that 44 percent of workers’ skills will be disrupted by 2028 and six in ten workers will require training before 2027.
Despite the urgent need for agility in skills development as workplace requirements evolve faster than ever before, the same report found that only half of workers have access to adequate training opportunities.
Ironically, while AI is a major driver of skills disruption, it’s also a key enabler for navigating it. By standardizing skills taxonomies, maintaining up-to-date skills inventories and identifying emerging gaps and training needs, AI can lay the groundwork for targeted upskilling and reskilling initiatives. By leveraging such AI-driven insights, talent teams will be well positioned to build highly targeted and future-proof learning and development (L&D) programs.
Looking ahead to 2025, organizations that embrace lifelong learning and invest meaningfully in L&D will widen the gap between themselves and competitors. Those that take the lead in adopting social and collaborative learning platforms, like Avature Learning, will not only attract top talent but also ensure their workforce is primed to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. In contrast, companies that lag behind may jeopardize both their talent pipeline and long-term success.
HR Trend 6: The Rise of Hyper-Personalized Experiences
While the push for personalized experiences in HR is not new, 2025 marks a renewed focus on this critical area. In an era where seamless, user-friendly interactions are the norm thanks to AI, candidates and employees now expect the same immediacy and personalization in their workplace experiences. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it will play a pivotal role in enabling organizations to deliver hyper-personalized journeys at scale, from tailored candidate engagement to dynamic career development paths.
Experience design is finally emerging as a cornerstone HR discipline, empowering organizations to stand out in an increasingly competitive talent market. At Avature, our advisory services team has been helping customers craft these tailored journeys for years, running workshops that bridge strategy with execution. Now, as this discipline gains traction industry-wide, organizations that prioritize experience design will find themselves uniquely positioned to engage and retain top talent in 2025 and beyond.
As experience design is relatively new to HR, not to mention difficult to get right, progress here will be limited, but that does not mean progress will not be made. The simple act of reorganizing HR and HRIS teams around a “Product Design” mindset will yield some promising results and better support HR’s efforts to shape ongoing digital transformations into HR transformations too.
However, legacy solutions will continue to prevent HR leaders from crafting bespoke experiences that delight candidates. So while we will see more of the startup mentality in HR, this reality will continue to hamper strategic efforts. This failure will also continue to impact internal stakeholders, limiting adoption, productivity and ROI.
In response, we’ll see more and more organizations investing in adaptable, best-in-class technology that can integrate with their legacy systems of record. Such “overlays” will work on top of existing software to augment the user experience across the board to deliver the hyper-personalized stakeholder experiences needed to drive long-term success
If you’re really serious about having the best talent in your company, enable your talent acquisition team to be the very best versions of themselves and don’t bore them with technology that is not fit for purpose.”
Sharron O’Donnell,
Head of Talent Acquisition,Virgin Media O2
To conclude
We’re currently in the midst of a technological leap, and as we step into 2025, the pace of technological change and disruption will only accelerate. The organizations that will end up on the right side of disruption will be those that leverage AI to streamline non-controversial, employee-focused use cases while simultaneously crafting bold visions that deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.
Success will hinge on strategic investments in adaptable technology and a commitment to continuous learning, agility and innovation. In this period of rapid change, HR has the opportunity to lead the charge, driving transformation that benefits both the workforce and the business.
