This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

2024 was a year of major transformations in the workforce: the surge in AI adoption, shifts in the makeup of the C-suite, and new approaches to worker well-being and DEI initiatives.

For the final roundtable of Business Insider's Workforce Innovation series, Rebecca Knight, a contributing reporter for BI, asked board members to predict the most important changes for the workforce in 2025.

In their predictions, participants highlighted the advancement of AI agents and search results as well as the importance of learning opportunities to help employees keep up with new technology.

They also discussed the trend toward skills-focused hiring and talent management — but they also emphasized the challenges of executing it.

"I think there can be a difference between larger organizations that have been focused on this for a while versus midsize and smaller companies that perhaps are just starting that journey," said Purvi Tailor, the vice president of human resources at Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA.

Jack Azagury, the group chief executive for consulting at Accenture, shared his company's experience implementing skills-based HR during the pandemic, when it had to retrain more than 100,000 employees on cloud technology.

"We've been on the journey for about 10 years on skills-based HR," he said. "It took a while to get it right."

The roundtable participants were:

• Anant Adya, executive vice president, service offering head, and head of Americas delivery, Infosys
• Jack Azagury, group chief executive for consulting, Accenture
• Lucrecia Borgonovo, chief talent and organizational effectiveness officer, Mastercard
• Kenon Chen, executive vice president of strategy and growth, Clear Capital
• Maggie Hulce, chief revenue officer, Indeed
• Shane Koller, senior vice president and chief people officer, Ancestry
• Justina Nixon-Saintil, vice president and chief impact officer, IBM
• Marjorie Powell, chief HR officer and senior vice president, AARP
• Purvi Tailor, vice president of human resources, Ferring Pharmaceuticals USA
• Sharawn Tipton, chief people and culture officer, LiveRamp

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Knight: What do you predict will be the single most important change in the workforce in 2025? And what advice do you have for business leaders to prepare themselves for that change?

AI search, workflows, and ethics

Kenon Chen: I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think it'll have a really large impact, which is the idea of an AI-first search. This is where the search funnel is providing direct answers as opposed to just a ranked set of results. I think of it as summary-before-source results.

There are a number of companies looking at adopting this technology in-house as a way of modernizing the knowledge base and providing employees with direct searchable information to do their jobs.

It really changes the historical barriers to accessing subject-matter expertise within a company. To access someone who used to be the owner of that data or the one who knew the most about that subject, you had to engage their time. In this new world, you can bypass all of that and get an answer. But it might not be the most accurate answer.

If it's leveraged well, I think companies can actually have a really strong competitive advantage, because making data more available to employees can help people have shared goals and derive their value from achieving that shared goal together as opposed to just managing data currency.

Justina Nixon-Saintil: There's been a lot of talk about AI agents. I think there are two areas that companies have to really focus on for 2025. One is how do you balance innovation versus executing some of these AI systems in the most responsible way? And I think both of them are tied to ethical AI and skills building. Focusing on upskilling your employees and making sure you have a skilled talent pipeline in AI will be critical for employers this year.

The second thing is the ethical responsibilities that companies have. When you're providing a prompt for a system to execute something, you really have to consider the implications of that. What are the types of guardrails that you have to put in place to be able to use AI agents effectively and also safeguard your company?

Maggie Hulce: There are incremental projects in particular functions that are using AI to make workflows better. Then there are the reimagination projects of how should this customer journey be radically different if AI can drive all of these steps? And it cuts across many people's ownership lines and teams.

Organizationally, how do you make sure there's a group of people set up and empowered to say, "I can think about problems that would shake up a lot of things with a clean sheet of paper"? I think if we leave it for each function to sort out when it's that loaded across functions, it's too challenging.

Culturally, how do we reward innovation and adaptability and let people embrace change? How do you reward and reinforce a culture that says: "You figured out how we could do this translation thing totally differently. Don't worry that we need to retrain the manual translation team; we will retrain them. Think about what can and should be changed with AI."

Lifelong learning and upskilling

Marjorie Powell: The workforce is continually being driven by the aging of the population and the growing prominence of older workers.

In 2024, you saw more people over 65 choosing to stay in the workforce than ever before, partly because of the rising cost of living and concerns about retirement security. So employers are going to have to adapt by creating age-inclusive workplaces. They're going to have to harness the experience and the skills of older workers.

This is also going to mean that we have to rethink traditional career trajectories and offer flexible work arrangements. We're going to have to invest in lifelong learning opportunities for older workers, keep them engaged, and keep them invested in the workplace.

Shane Koller: This is a key area where the HR function can and should influence companies going forward. What I see in the workforce, even with employees who are relatively tech-savvy, is that it feels like they're stuck right now on what next step they need to take to be along with the ride versus being left behind. This is where we as a function have to really get out of neutral and help the workforce understand what those next steps are.

Nixon-Saintil: Lifelong learning doesn't just end with AI. You have to consider the acceleration of technology. How do we make sure people understand that every new wave of technology will demand new skills and that lifelong learners will thrive? This has to be a complete mindset change for employees and employers from an investment perspective.

The other thing, just with my social-responsibility hat on, is how do we make sure we're investing in populations and providing them with access to free skilling, mentors, and real learning experiences so that they can be prepared? How do we build that talent pipeline?

That's something we are doing through programs like IBM SkillsBuild. But it's overall something that every company needs to consider — not just investing in your employees but looking at universities, K-12 systems, and partnerships with nonprofit organizations that focus on marginalized groups and provide free access to these new skills and technologies.

Skills-based talent management

Anant Adya: I'm a big believer that skills are more important than the four-year college degrees that everybody runs after. We recruit a lot from underrepresented communities and communities in general where we do not look for degrees.

In fact, we are going to announce some sort of target for ourselves where we say that X percentage of our population is going to come from skills and not from four-year degrees.

Sharawn Tipton: I also see skills-based talent management as one of the biggest trends for 2025. We talk a lot about experience and what people have in their tool kits, but it's really about skill and learning agility, because the technology is moving so quickly that you have to work in a different way.

Jack Azagury: Skills-based HR is a very complex area. The first pointer I'd give is to start in one place, not the entire enterprise, and pilot and get the algorithms. It took us years to get the right algorithm to determine what skills somebody had.

The second is to be very transparent about how you're measuring skills. For example, our algorithm says you need to have worked on this type of job for this amount of months, and that job cannot be more than six months old.

The third thing I would say is do not use skills-based HR for cost reduction.

The fourth is employees need to see how you're going to use skills-based HR — how you're going to give people new opportunities, training, and development. They need to see the positive coming out for their careers in your organization.

Lucrecia Borgonovo: The biggest change is definitely going to be around skills-powered organizations. We know that there's not necessarily a playbook and we have to cocreate this playbook together. I think this requires pretty significant change management in addition to tech enablement.

What we say to our leaders at Mastercard is to make sure that you're taking on a much more enterprise-wide versus siloed approach when you think about talent and skills.

From an employee standpoint, we were talking about learning agility as a huge currency. You want to have employees who are curious, open, and adaptable and who could be much more fundable in this incredibly changing workplace.

Chen: The best way to prepare for change and transformation is to ensure your fundamentals are in place. There's a reason sports teams, musicians, and other folks who are trying to master a new skill often go back to make sure their fundamentals are really solid so they have a foundation to build upon for something new.

I've been thinking about that a lot for AI and skills-based HR. If the basics — things like transparency, communication, shared mission, purpose, and culture — aren't in place, it's really difficult to engage in a radical transformation. The speed all this is moving at is so rapid that it's impossible to predict exactly how this might play out. But if the fundamentals are in place, you can weather those unknowns.