ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2025: AI agents will significantly improve employee productivity

ARK Invest‘s Big Ideas 2025 highlights the convergences between and among the five technologically enabled innovation platforms evolving today: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Energy Storage, Public Blockchains, and Multiomic Sequencing. In 2025, ARK features 11 Big Ideas illustrating the massive transformations occurring today. 

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ARK’s thematic investment strategies span market capitalizations, sectors, and geographies to focus on companies that we expect to be the leaders, enablers, and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation. Companies that ARK believes are capitalizing on disruptive innovation and developing technologies to displace older technologies or create new markets may not, in fact, do so.

Here are the 11 Big Ideas 2025 , including a focus on AI agents:  

ARK’s 11 Big Ideas 2025

1. The Second Half of the Chessboard: Convergence among technology platforms leading to significant acceleration in macroeconomic growth
2. AI Agents: Redefining consumer interactions and business workflows
3. Bitcoin: A maturing global monetary system with sound network fundamentals and growing institutional adoption
4. Stablecoins: Reshaping the digital asset space
5. Scaling Blockchain: Enabling steep cost declines and new use cases at the application layer
6. Robotaxis: Transforming personal mobility while lowering costs and enhancing safety
7. Autonomous Logistics: Cutting costs, revolutionizing supply chains, and reshaping consumer behavior
8. Energy: Powering the artificial intelligence revolution
9. Robotics: Decoupling physical labor from output
10. Reusable Rockets
11. Multiomics: Operationalizing data with AI to transform diagnostics, drug discovery, and therapies

ARK’s research begins by highlighting the significant impact of AI on all other technologies. Enabled primarily by architectural improvements in AI systems, performance per dollar of AI compute is expected to improve more than 1,000x by 2030. At that time, we expect compute performance to have doubled 64 times since the advent of the integrated circuit. AI advances should unlock massive market opportunities. As AI continues to accelerate, robotaxis should proliferate, drug development timelines and costs should collapse, and AI agents should solve software engineering challenges autonomously, monitoring and modifying systems around the clock. Another key area of growth will be AI agents.

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What are AI agents? AI agents are poised to accelerate the adoption of digital applications and create an epochal shift in human-computer interaction. AI agents:

• Understand intent through natural language
• Plan using reasoning and appropriate context
• Take action using tools to accomplish the intent
• Improve through iteration and continuous learning

Here are examples of business, market, and innovation disruption opportunities based on wider adoption of AI agents in the next decade:

Consumer brand discovery: According to ARK, AI agents will transform consumer search and discovery. Embedded in the operating systems of consumer hardware, AI agents empower consumers to delegate all discovery and research to AI — a massive time-saver. Curated AI results will contextualize digital ad impressions.

Advertising spend: AI-mediated ads should take the lion’s share of digital ad revenue by 2030. According to ARK, if search shifts to personal AI agents, AI-mediated ad revenue could surge. By 2030, we believe AI ad revenue could account for more than 54% of the $1.1 trillion digital ad market.

Also: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

Online Shopping: AI-mediated shopping is likely to approach 25% of addressable online sales globally by 2030. The growing use of AI agents in consumer shopping should streamline product discovery, personalization, and purchasing. ARK research suggests that AI agents could facilitate nearly $9 trillion in global gross online consumption by 2030.

AI-powered digital wallets: Digital wallets are positioned for continued share gains in e-commerce. ARK’s research suggests that digital wallets empowered by AI purchasing agents — taking share from payment methods like credit and debit cards — could account for 72% of all e-commerce transactions by 2030.

Market consolidation: Digital wallets are consolidating financial services and e-commerce. Based on their consumer-facing operations, the market is valuing leading digital wallet platforms like Block, Robinhood, and SoFi at $1,800 per user today.

AI agents guiding the shopping journey: Digital wallet purchasing agents could become central to the shopping journey. Agentic lead generation should move digital wallets upstream to capture market share in e-commerce and digital spending globally. “One-click checkout” should give way to “one-query purchasing.”

Also: 93% of IT leaders will implement AI agents in the next two years

Enterprise growth in valuations: Purchasing agents should increase the enterprise value of digital wallets, notably in e-commerce. Based on lead-generation take rates, AI purchasing agents could generate global revenue between $40 billion and $200 billion — ARK’s base and bull cases, respectively — for digital wallet platforms in 2030. In 2030, AI-powered purchasing agents could add between $50 and $200 per user to the enterprise value (EV) of digital wallets in the U.S.

Increased employee productivity powered by software: In the enterprise, agents will increase productivity via software. Companies that deploy agents should be able to increase unit volume with the same workforce and/or optimize their workforce toward higher-value activities. As AI evolves, agents are likely to handle a higher percentage of workloads and complete higher-value tasks independently.

AI costs are declining: ARK notes that AI cost declines should impact agent economics significantly. ARK also notes that new products from Salesforce are supplementing human customer service representatives cost-effectively. Even at a fixed cost of $1 per conversation, AI agents could save enterprises significant sums once they can handle 35% of customer service inquiries. AI agents should also lower onboarding and hiring costs, as well as seat-based software costs, while scaling more easily than human labor.

Also: AI agents might be the new workforce, but they still need a manager

Software developments cycles are shrinking: AI is also reshaping the software value chain. ARK notes that the coding skills of AI agents are improving rapidly, accelerating the software development lifecycle. As the cost to create software declines, software production should accelerate and sway enterprise “build vs. buy” decisions, displacing traditional software incumbents that are slow to adapt. As customer software proliferates, growth in all layers of the software stack should accelerate, even as share shifts toward the platform layer.

AI is supercharging knowledge workers: ARK concludes by highlighting how AI will supercharge knowledge work. Through 2030, ARK expects the amount of software deployed per knowledge worker to grow considerably as businesses invest in productivity solutions. Depending on adoption rates, global spend on software could accelerate from an annual rate of 14% over the last 10 years to annual rates of 18% to 48%.

Also: Autonomous businesses will be powered by AI agents

ARK’s Big Ideas 2025 highlights11 big ideas with comprehensive and compelling data and forecasting methodologies. The Autonomous Logistics and Robotics big ideas are equally compelling and speak to the 4th wave of AI innovation — predictive, generative, agentic, and physical AI. All 11 big ideas benefit from AI advancements. To learn more about the Big Idea 2025 report, you can visit here.