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ZDNET's key takeaways
Gartner has released its 2025 Hype Cycle report.
AI agents and data are at their most inflated and need precise application to yield results.
The report also emphasized trust and safety efforts as critical to the next five years.
Research firm Gartner has released its annual Hype Cycle report, which investigates whether new technology is living up to expectations or is still far off from making a meaningful impact. At the top of the list this year? AI agents.
The report comes at a time when tech companies are making big promises about AI's capabilities and the extent to which it will become entrenched in our everyday lives, both at home and work.
Gartner named four main technologies: agents, AI-ready data, multimodal AI, and what it called "AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM)." Let's break down what it says about each one.
AI agents and AI-ready data
AI agents refer to increasingly autonomous systems that can carry out tasks for humans, ideally with little to no intervention. However, at their simplest, they can function like standard chatbots or assistants; "agent" remains a pretty widely defined word, meaning what agents actually do varies significantly in terms of sophistication and application.
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