2025 Predictions Review: The Year Work Chose Control Over Trust
At the end of 2024, I wrote that leaders had a rare chance to redefine work. Not through perks or programs, but through clarity, flexibility, meaningful engagement, and rebuilt trust.
Twelve months later, the biggest signal is this:
We didn’t hit a technology ceiling. We hit a leadership maturity ceiling.
AI moved fast. Organizational trust moved backwards. And the gap between what we say work should be and how work is actually experienced widened.
Below is my 2025 reality check on five predictions, grounded in what we’ve seen across the market and supported by widely reported data and research (Gallup, Gartner, McKinsey, Stanford/ADP, Reuters, Indeed, and others).
1) Generative AI’s Refinement
Prediction: GenAI would move from broad excitement to targeted use. Annual reviews and performance cycles would become even more administrative unless leaders reclaimed them as human moments.
What happened: AI absolutely refined into practical workflows. But instead of improving the quality of performance conversations, it often made it easier to avoid them.
Multiple surveys and reports show managers using AI for high-stakes people decisions. Raises. Promotions. Layoffs. Terminations. In some cases, AI is influencing outcomes with minimal training or guardrails.
At the same time, broader indicators of trust in the workplace remain weak. Gallup’s findings on respect at work returning to record lows is the clearest signal. When respect drops, reviews stop being developmental. They become transactional.
It’s true, AI made performance reviews faster. But it did not make them better. In too many organizations, it accelerated the decline of meaningful leadership conversations.
2) Virtual AI Coaching’s Rise
Prediction: AI coaching would grow in hybrid work, giving employees personalized support and helping overextended managers. The risk would be inconsistency and replacing relationships instead of augmenting them.
What happened: AI coaching and manager simulation tools expanded. But the adoption pattern wasn’t “blend the best of both worlds.” It was often “replace, reduce, and call it innovation.”
We saw organizations automate roles away, then later realize the cost of missing human judgment and bring people back. We also saw early-career hiring get squeezed, especially in AI-exposed roles. Stanford research using ADP data points to meaningful declines in employment for early-career workers in those occupations.
That’s not a small trend. It’s a structural warning. When you remove junior roles, you break the apprenticeship pipeline that builds future leaders.
Ultimately, AI coaching scaled practice. But many organizations tried to scale substitution. That created fragility, not capability.
3) HR’s Tactical Retreat
Prediction: HR would shift toward compliance while executives and business units take direct control of engagement and performance.
What happened: This prediction partially landed, but the bigger story was bifurcation, not retreat.
At the top, HR is being asked to help lead workforce strategy, AI governance, and risk. But operationally, HR is often being centralized, reduced, or automated. McKinsey’s HR Monitor showed some organizations planning notable HR headcount reductions, while genAI in core HR processes still appeared limited or stuck in pilots.
Meanwhile, business units did not consistently step into the ownership gap. In many places, no one did. That created fragmentation. Inconsistent experiences. Manager-by-manager culture. And a drift toward compliance and reaction instead of design.
In reality, it wasn’t HR stepping back that mattered. It was the absence of a clear replacement for how culture and people decisions get made.
4) Well-being by Design
Prediction: Well-being would move from “nice-to-have” to a strategic imperative, embedded into decisions and measured like performance.
What happened: Global engagement declined again. Manager engagement fell. And well-being indicators softened.
Gallup’s reporting captured the broader truth. Stress and strain are not being designed out of work. They’re being normalized as the cost of doing business.
At the same time, Gartner and other analysts flagged loneliness and disconnection as real organizational risks. That’s a direct contradiction to the idea that we’re rebuilding the human foundation of work.
I’m not sure we’ve hit bottom yet. And 2025 reinforced the most important lesson: well-being cannot be bolted on. It has to be designed into how work is staffed, scoped, prioritized, and led.
This year showed which companies meant it. And which ones were renting the language.
5) Agile Reckoning
Prediction: Agile would face a reckoning. Teams doing it well would thrive. Teams turning it into bureaucracy would stall. Leaders would need to refocus on outcomes over outputs.
What happened: Agile became a scapegoat. Instead of confronting leadership issues, unclear priorities, overloaded teams, weak decision-making, constant scope churn, many organizations blamed the method and stripped away delivery roles.
The consolidation trend is visible. PMI bringing Agile Alliance into its ecosystem is one marker of Agile evolving into a broader delivery world. But evolution is not the same as execution.
In many places, “Agile failed” became shorthand for “we didn’t have clarity.”
We’ve seen this cycle before. Project management gets minimized without replacing it with real delivery ownership. The pendulum swings toward chaos. Then it slows. Then it swings back.
Agile wasn’t the issue. Accountability was. It’s easier to blame a methodology than confront the leadership behaviors that break delivery.
What 2025 Revealed About the Future of Work
In 2025, the future of work didn’t get blocked by technology. It got blocked by trust issues.
AI accelerated everything from productivity experiments to organizational redesign and decision velocity. In too many places, that acceleration became an excuse to replace human systems rather than strengthen them.
And it exposed what many leaders still haven’t internalized:
We don’t have a tooling problem. We have a trust problem.
Moving forward, the competitive advantage won’t come from adopting the most AI, even though every technology company wants you to believe AI is the answer. It will come from designing the healthiest, clearest, most human operating model that AI can amplify.
The organizations that win next will be the ones that:
Treat performance moments as trust infrastructure
Protect apprenticeship and early-career development
Rebuild manager capability as a core operating requirement
Design work for sustainability, not just output
Stop blaming methods and start owning clarity
Because today’s success still depends on what we do well today.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow I will release my predictions for 2026!
