Name: AI in 2025 sparks investment surge, innovation and job fears
Uploaded: 2025-12-30T13:32:53.027Z
Duration: 2 min 56 s
Description: 2025 has been a big year in the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). But how will it develop in 2026?

2025 has been a big year in the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). But how will it develop in 2026?

Doha

In 2025, global investment in artificial intelligence reached unprecedented levels, with the seven largest technology firms spending $380 billion on AI infrastructure. These investments have led to the development of advanced AI models capable of creating videos, running autonomous agents, and controlling robots, although only a small percentage of companies have realized significant value from their AI pilots.

At an AI conference in Doha, experts demonstrated how AI agents are now able to perform complex tasks, such as analyzing financial reports and supporting data-driven decisions in fields like healthcare. Despite improvements in AI reasoning and human-like interfaces, the integration of AI into the workplace remains in its early stages, prompting ongoing concerns about potential impacts on human employment.

AI in 2025 sparks investment surge, innovation and job fears

I'm here at an AI conference in Doha, Qatar, because this year has seen an enormous investment in the rollout of artificial intelligence. We're all using it, companies are thriving off of it, but the truth is AI isn't just changing the way that we work. It's also beginning to do a lot of the work itself. Three years into the AI revolution brought on by the launch of ChatGPT, the seven biggest firms spent $380 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. They built new models that create videos, run agents, and control robots. But a study of companies that have invested billions in AI pilots shows only 5% have yielded any value so far. AI is moving from just giving us answers to completing full tasks on its own. The buzzword here is AI agents, and they're everywhere. Let's go have a look at two of them. An agent is just an AI software that can do one or multiple things at the same time. It can give you a video. It can give you a mind map, reports, flashcards, the quiz, infographic, slide, and data table. Infographic will illustrate the reasoning part very well. This AI agent took a complex financial report and created an infographic, but the details are what matter. Those numbers are accurate. And that's because of the sheer size of the data set that trained it. The number of parameters in the model itself. Now the model is multiple folds of what we have. The number of parameters, it understands the relationship between data so it can tell, oh, that's a balance sheet. Over at Microsoft, another giant, the AI takes the form of multiple agents. For example, here we have an investment opportunity with an investment proposal. We have expert agents, for example, the financial expert, the market expert, that will give us analysis of that. So they challenge each other. They sit in a committee. They try to evaluate from different angles. And this is what we're trying to replicate with these agents. AI is only as good as the data it's given. If you wanted to build a model to study muscle performance, for instance, like Qatar University is, you would need to start with good data. Or in their case, you need to make it yourself. We are measuring the electrical activity at the muscles, and we are feeding this to the machine learning. And this information will allow physiotherapists, will allow coaches to take data-driven decisions. At the end of 2025, AI has better reasoning and can seem more human, but we're only just starting to use it in the workplace. It chats to us, finishes our tasks, and wears many faces. Avatars like this are useful for putting a human face on top of all of this AI reasoning. But now that AI can complete tasks, the question is how soon this will replace the humans we're so used to interfacing with. Colin Baker, Al Jazeera, Doha.

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