AI Trends 2025
The latest AI trends that may transform our world throughout 2025
Welcome back to another edition of New Economies, which is rooted in my experiences working in venture. We’re living in extraordinary times—the most exciting era ever for technology, with groundbreaking trends emerging constantly that will redefine how we live and work in the future. Join me on this journey—subscribe to New Economies to stay ahead of the curve in technology. We’re just getting started!
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Taking a look back at 2024
AI was the defining technology trend of 2024, capturing widespread attention as we contemplated its adoption and the profound impact it could have on our future. A flurry of new startups also emerged, with 30% of all venture funding going towards AI-related startups, which also included a number being acquired and reaching unicorn status.
A pressing question on many minds is—will the AI trend persist throughout 2025?
Throughout this edition, we explore the latest technology trends that have captured the attention of forward-thinking leaders, exploring how they might shape the AI landscape over the next twelve months.
AI Trends For 2025
Decoding complex data…
In 2025, I’m excited to see how AI will continue to evolve and unlock its full strength by decoding complex, unstructured data—a challenge many solutions still face. While much of the industry focuses on content generation, the true competitive edge lies in extracting deep, quality, and actionable insights. Tools capable of delivering precise, granular analysis and surface meaningful patterns will transform decision-making and fuel growth in today’s data-driven world.
—Joseph Lee, Co-Founder and CEO at Syncly (YC W23)
AI Agents to be adopted within the workplace…
2025 will mark the year businesses stop thinking of AI as tools and start treating them as co-workers. This isn't just semantic—it's a fundamental shift in how organizations operate. While this transformation raises hard questions about the future of work, it's unlocking unprecedented opportunities for businesses that have been held back by resource constraints.
—Naama Manova-Twito, Co-Founder at MarkeTeam
The shift to Agentic employee companies…
In 2025, I am excited about the shift to Agentic employee companies—i.e. natively from the ground up where the employee base is more agentic than human. For example, an agentic law firm would respond in minutes, not days.
—Chris Tottman, Partner at Notion Capital
The super charger for non technical people…
In 2025, I am excited to observe how AI is democratizing technology access. Advancements such as low-code and no-code platforms, accessible AI libraries, and cloud-based services have made it remarkably easier for small teams—even non-programmers—to quickly build products. This surge in empowerment is driving innovation forward, and I’m excited to see where it leads throughout 2025.
—Lorenzo Mengolini, Lead Product Designer at Revolut
The impact of tone of voice…
In 2025, I am particularly excited about the opportunities that AI combined with human creativity will open when it comes to content strategy. Whether it comes to SEO, content personalization in campaigns, CRM, tutorials and Social Media, AI will help creating tons of topical, fresh, localized and personalized content. What will be make-or-break for the brands however, is how the brand tone of voice and personality will shine through and help emerge and create differentiation. This can only be done through human expertise and experience.
—Flore Tyberghein, Chief Marketing Officer at BlaBla Car
The ROI on AI will peak…
In 2025, AI ROI (return on investment) will peak as compute costs will plummet as real business impact is realized. Open source models will lead to much lower cost use-case specific models deployed on commodity hardware. At the same time, experimental use cases from 2024 will evolve into full production platforms as AI is made more reliable.
—Cy Khormaee, Vice President, Product Management at Attentive
Voice becoming our primary interface…
In 2025, I am excited about voice AI becoming our primary interface with technology. After seeing my aunt chat naturally in Serbian with AI, I'm convinced it will bring AI to the next billion users.
—John Milinovich, Head of GenAI Product at Canva
Copilots for all jobs…
In 2025, there will be copilot for all jobs, not just knowledge workers. There will be copilots with hardware+software+AI+machine vision solutions for general contractors, architects, and policeman etc.
—Sri Batchu, Chief Marketing Officer at The RealReal
Using AI thoughtfully…
In 2025, I’m excited about how AI is challenging us to work smarter, not just faster. It’s not just about automating processes but using AI thoughtfully—to better understand users and create work that truly resonates. The power of AI lies in how we use it: not to produce more for the sake of it, but to deliver work that is impactful, meaningful, and adds real value.
—Lihi Lotker, Former Head of Marketing at Coho AI
Vertical specific applications…
In 2025, I am most excited about the convergence of Generative AI and vertical-specific applications. In 2025, we’re seeing AI evolve beyond generic tools into specialized solutions—whether it’s automating legal processes, creating personalized marketing strategies, or enhancing digital health through AI-driven diagnostics and preventative care. This shift allows businesses to address real-world problems with precision and scale.Lastly, the rise of AI-augmented decision-making to combat information overload is transformative. As AI becomes a horizontal layer across industries, it’s enabling faster, smarter choices, which will drive innovation in everything from financial inclusion to climate tech.
—Azmat Ali, Former Head of Marketing, Rider Products at Lyft
AI agents becoming indispensable for software developers…
In 2025, I am excited about AI agents becoming indispensable for software developers. These intelligent assistants will not only automate mundane tasks like code generation and debugging but also act as true collaborators.
They will understand the developer's intent, suggest optimal solutions, and even help refactor code for better maintainability. This shift will not only dramatically increase developer productivity but also empower developers to focus on higher-level creative tasks and innovation.
—Nandan Thor, Head of AI at Palo Alto Networks
Advancements in quantum computing…
In 2025, my wishful thinking is to hear less about GenAI and focus more broadly on machine learning applications. I’m especially curious to see how machine learning as a service evolves and would love to start hearing more news about advancements in quantum computing. Could AI and quantum computing become the perfect combo?
—Stefania Bonà, Head of AI Products at Trustly
AI co-workers operating on autopilot…
In 2025, I am excited about the transformative potential of AI-powered specialist employees that can operate on autopilot with their own objective function, taking on the core responsibilities of key departmental functions.
Take HR and talent acquisition as an example. The typical tasks of a sourcer can now be delegated to four main agents. AI search agent can autonomously scan vast talent pools on platforms like LinkedIn, identifying high-fit candidates using nuanced criteria that go far beyond simple keyword matching - analysing skills, experiences, and even inferred potential.Evaluators use AI to assess these candidates’ suitability while anonymising profiles and employing fairness checks to mitigate bias. Outreach agents handle engagement at scale, creating hyper-personalised messages that resonate with candidates, and scheduling agents seamlessly coordinate interviews by dynamically managing calendars across teams.
—Teo Borschberg, CEO at Ogment Inc
Advancements in data infrastructure…
In 2025, I am excited about advancements in data infrastructure enabling AI by unifying fragmented systems and streamlining ETL. Tools like Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Trino reduce latency, while metadata-driven orchestration ensures consistent, high-quality data for AI frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
These innovations bridge legacy and cloud systems, enabling faster, more effective AI deployment for enterprise use cases like fraud detection and predictive analytics.
—Chris Zeoli, Partner at Wing Venture Capital
Building products at the fraction of a price…
In 2025, I am excited about the seismic shift that AI will bring to personal outcomes. From using AI coders to create apps and monetize them within seconds, to using AI language learning tutors or live translation to remove cultural barriers, to 10x-ing performance at work with the use of agents. The cost of creating something from scratch has gone down tremendously and we will see exciting new products pop up at a faster pace than ever.
—Mila Cramer, Principal Project A Ventures
Democratizing AI through open source technologies…
In 2025, I am excited about the broad democratization of AI through open source technologies. Companies can now build and deploy specialized models using mature, open source tools rather than relying on external proprietary solutions.
This shift is unlocking a new wave of practical AI adoption, as organizations of all sizes can finally create AI tailored to their specific needs without sacrificing control over their production data.
—Misha Herscu, CEO and Co-Founder Cake AI
AI becoming more intuitive and conversational…
In 2025, I am excited to see interactions with AI become more intuitive and conversational, moving away from clunky and transactional exchanges. As voice and video models become more capable I believe we will see a large shift in adoption toward voice being the dominant way we communicate with AI in our daily lives.
—Matthew Hennigan, Senior Associate at Plug and Play Ventures
LLMs to run on CPUs of regular laptops…
In 2025, I am excited about small, local LLMs most likely becoming small and efficient enough to run on CPUs of regular laptops, while being competitive with the hosted LLMs such as OpenAI's, at least for specific tasks.
—Egor Kraev, Principal AI Scientist at Wise Plc
AI shaping more personal and private experiences…
In 2025, I’m excited about AI becoming more integrated into people’s daily lives - feeling less like a service they need to invoke at times - and more an intuitive force that somehow always makes their work and life more productive and joyful.
I’m also excited about AI moving closer to the edge on people’s devices allowing us to shape more personal and private experiences.
I also remain optimistic about the breakthroughs in the physical sciences particularly medicine and material science that it has the potential to unlock.
—Satyajeet Salgar, Director of Product Management and User Experience, AI Innovation and Research at Google
Chain of thought reasoning models…
In 2025, I am excited about chain of thought reasoning models. LLMs are largely considered a black box which takes in inputs and produces an output. However, there are a lot of reliability issues with this type of model, as we have no easy way to actually understand how the model was able to arrive at its final output.
However, with chain of thought models we can see the model start to "reason" similar to how a human would, and partially understand how it arrived at it's answer. This ability to deconstruct a complex problem into its constituent pieces will be crucial as we develop more comprehensive agentic models, and try to make models more reliable.
—Rahul Gudise, CEO at Gale
The takeover of horizontal agents…
In 2025, I am excited about the takeover of horizontal AI agents. These are true generalists who can learn and excel at a broad range of tasks. In contrast, what today are called "agents" often reduce to vertical-specific "pipelines". With increasingly better reasoning models and multimodal perception, 2025 will be the year horizontal agents flourish.
—Harvey Hu, Founder and CTO at Tessa
A new era for travel search…
In 2025, I am excited about LLMs and AI Agents to redefine the travel research, planning and booking process, making it a highly contextual, personalized and super easy agentic workflow.
Access to truly personalized insights and recommendations, based on trusted content, comprehensive 1st party data and deep usage of Generative AI, will be game changing for millions of global traveler’s, making adventures easier to plan and opening doors to incredible new experiences.
—Rahul Todkar, Head of Data and AI at Tripadvisor
AI voice agents sound remarkably human…
In 2025, I’m excited about the next wave of AI voice agents, especially their ability to sound remarkably human. What’s truly amazing is how capable large language models (LLMs) have become, now able to deliver hyper-accurate answers, even to highly specialized questions, with near-perfect precision.
That kind of precision and realism is a game-changer for customer support roles, where deep expertise on a specific system can make all the difference.
—Shaun Lane, Co-Founder and CEO at Riviera
AI safety…
In 2025, I am excited about AI Safety. As we head closer to AGI, AI safety becomes more important than ever, but at the same time, getting alignment is difficult.
—Jeffrey Ip, Co-founder and CEO at Confident AI
Enhancing sustainability…
In 2025, I’m most excited about AI-driven technologies that enhance sustainability by empowering smarter decision-making across industries. In agriculture, for example, AI is transforming how we monitor and optimize plant health, reduce waste, and improve resource efficiency, aligning with the urgent need for sustainable food systems.
Beyond agriculture, AI is driving innovation in renewable energy management, circular economy solutions, and climate modeling, helping us tackle global challenges with actionable insights. What excites me most is how these technologies are moving us closer to a future where innovation and sustainability are inseparable, creating tangible solutions for both people and the planet.
—Valeria Kogan, CEO at Fermata
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Actually really like reading quotes like this fairly re-readable as well.
long but good to read - saved