The Future of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the World

The future of AI involves the expansion of the technology’s role in everyday life, from performing data analysis and research to assisting with human care and household tasks to enhancing workplace efficiency and safety, with growing influence from generative AI tools like ChatGPT and more.

Innovations in the field of artificial intelligence continue to shape the future of humanity across nearly every industry. AI is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and generative AI has further expanded the possibilities and popularity of AI.

As of 2024, about 42 percent of enterprise-scale companies have actively deployed AI in their business. Plus, 92 percent of companies plan to increase their investments in AI technology from 2025 to

With so many changes coming at such a rapid pace, here’s what shifts in AI could mean for various industries and society at large.

The Evolution of AI

AI has come a long way since 1952, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester. Thanks to developments in machine learning and deep learning, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the company’s IBM Watson won Jeopardy! in

Since then, generative AI has spearheaded the latest chapter in AI’s evolution, with OpenAI releasing its first GPT model in

This has culminated in OpenAI developing ChatGPT, leading to a proliferation of tools that can process queries to produce relevant text, audio, images and other types of content.

Other companies have followed suit with competing products of their own, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models, which made headlines in early 2025 for approaching parity with competing models at a fraction of the operational cost.

AI has also been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech, technologies that rely on model

and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization.

How AI Will Impact the Future

Improved Business Automation

AI, especially generative AI, has already increased task automation for many businesses, and will likely continue to do so in the future. With the rise of chatbots and digital assistants, companies can rely on AI to handle simple conversations with customers and answer basic queries from employees.

AI’s ability to analyze massive amounts of data and convert its findings into convenient visual formats can also accelerate the decision-making process. Company leaders don’t have to spend time parsing through the data themselves, instead using instant insights to make informed decisions.

“If [developers] understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well, they start to make connections and say, ‘Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe that’s an AI problem,’” said Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA. “That’s more often the case than, ‘I have a specific problem I want to solve.’”

Job Disruption

Business automation has naturally led to fears over job losses. Although AI has made gains in the workplace, it’s had an unequal impact on different industries and professions. For example, repetitive jobs like data entry or processing and customer service are already being automated, but the demand for other jobs like machine learning specialists and information security analysts has risen.

Workers in creative positions are more likely to have their jobs augmented by AI, rather than outright replaced. Whether forcing employees to learn new tools or taking over their roles, AI is set to spur upskilling efforts at both the individual and company level.

“One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs,” said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the school’s Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Data Privacy Issues

Companies require large volumes of data to train the models that power generative AI tools, and this process has come under intense scrutiny. Concerns over companies collecting consumers’ personal data had led the FTC to open an investigation in 2023 into whether OpenAI has negatively impacted consumers through its data collection methods after the company potentially violated European data protection laws.

In response, the Biden-Harris administration developed an AI Bill of Rights in October 2023 that listed data privacy as one of its core principles. Although this legislation doesn’t carry much legal weight, it reflects the growing push to prioritize data privacy and compel AI companies to be more transparent and cautious about how they compile training data.

Increased Regulation

AI could shift the perspective on certain legal questions, depending on how generative AI lawsuits continue to unfold. For example, the issue of intellectual property has come to the forefront in light of copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI and Anthropic by writers, musicians and companies like The New York Times. These lawsuits affect how the U.S. legal system interprets what is private and public property, and a loss could spell major setbacks for OpenAI and its competitors.

Ethical issues that have surfaced in connection to generative AI have placed more pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stance. Despite this, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan unveiled in 2025 emphasizes a largely hands-off approach to AI regulation.

Climate Change Concerns

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. Optimists can view AI as a way to make supply chains more efficient, carrying out predictive maintenance and other procedures to reduce carbon emissions.

At the same time, AI could be seen as a key culprit in climate change. The energy and resources required to create and maintain AI models could raise carbon emissions by as much as 80 percent, dealing a devastating blow to any sustainability efforts within tech. Even if AI is applied to climate-conscious technology, the costs of building and training models could leave society in a worse environmental situation than before.

Accelerated Speed of Innovation

In a 2024 essay about the future potential of AI, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei hypothesizes that powerful AI technology could speed up research in the biological sciences as much as tenfold, bringing about a phenomenon he coins “the compressed 21st century,” in which 50 to 100 years of innovation might happen in the span of five to 10 years. This theory builds on the idea that truly revolutionary discoveries are made at a rate of maybe once per year, with the core limitation being a shortage of talented researchers.

By increasing the cognitive power devoted to developing hypotheses and testing them out, Amodei suggests, we might close the time gap between important discoveries like the 25-year delay between CRISPR’s discovery in the ‘80s and its application to gene editing.

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What Industries Will AI Impact the Most?

There’s virtually no major industry that modern AI hasn’t already affected. Here are a few of the industries undergoing the greatest changes as a result of AI.

AI in Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms and other manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has adapted well to the powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside humans to perform a limited range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive analysis sensors keep equipment running smoothly.

AI in Healthcare

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact with medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify diseases more quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and even monitor patients through virtual nursing assistants.

AI in Finance

Banks, insurers and financial institutions leverage AI for a range of applications like detecting fraud, conducting audits and evaluating customers for loans. Traders have also used machine learning’s ability to assess millions of data points at once, so they can quickly gauge risk and make smart investing decisions.

AI in Education

AI in education will change the way humans of all ages learn. AI’s use of machine learning, natural language processing and facial recognition help digitize textbooks, detect plagiarism and gauge the emotions of students to help determine who’s struggling or bored. Both presently and in the future, AI tailors the experience of learning to student’s individual needs.

AI in Media and Journalism

Journalism is harnessing AI too, and will continue to benefit from it. One example can be seen in The Associated Press’ use of Automated Insights, which produces thousands of earning reports stories per year. But as generative AI writing tools such as ChatGPT enter the market, questions about their use in journalism abound.

AI in Customer Service

AI in customer service can provide the industry with data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer and the provider. AI tools powering the customer service industry come in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

AI in Transportation

Transportation is one industry that is certainly teed up to be drastically changed by AI. Self-driving cars and AI travel planners are just a couple of facets of how we get from point A to point B that will be influenced by AI. Even though autonomous vehicles are far from perfect, they may one day ferry us from place to place.

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