Transforming Consumer Industries in the Age of AI 2025

The trajectory of AI technologies2 To get a better sense of what’s to come, it’s useful to take a quick look at the waves of AI evolution to date. The first wave was predictive, enabling businesses to forecast trends and make data-driven decisions. The second wave saw the emergence of a game-changer, LLMs powering genAI to enable content generation and conversational interactions. AI now more closely mimics human performance than ever before, and the technology is accelerating more rapidly (Figure 6). 20,212.1 AI evolutionAI has entered its third wave – agentic AI – where agents can make decisions with minimal human oversight and execute complex tasks. AI is reaching and exceeding human-like capabilities FIGURE 6 0%20%40%60%80%100%Within each domain, the initial performance of the Al is set to 0. Human performance is used as a baseline, set to 100%. When the Al's performance crosses the 100% line, it scored more points than humans. 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2023 2024 2022 Handwriting recognition Speech recognition Image recognition Reading comprehension Language understanding Language inference Grade school math Code generation Cognitive reasoning Source: Accenture analysis; Stanford University. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Report 2024. Now, the industry has entered its third wave, agentic AI, where AI systems can autonomously interact with each other to make and execute goal-oriented decisions. The number of companies with fully modernized, AI-led processes has nearly doubled from 9% in 2023 to 16% in 2024, according to a recent Accenture report. Already, compared to peers, these organizations are achieving 2.5 times higher revenue growth, 2.4 times greater productivity and 3.3 times greater success at scaling genAI use cases.22 Transforming Consumer Industries in the Age of AI 13