The evolution of AI in 2025 will be defined by significant shifts across software, safety, and scale. To help business leaders navigate this transformation, we take a practical, non-technical approach, connecting technical developments to AI’s real-world impacts.

 

We have identified ten key trends and broken each down in three levels of granularity—What You Need to Know, What You Should Know, and What Experts Are Talking About—guiding readers from foundational understanding to deep industry insight.

 

The result is an actionable, structured framework for decision-makers looking to stay ahead.

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Highlights:​

• A synthesis of 31 research reports, accumulating perspectives from a total of 34,173 survey responses from business leaders.

• An analysis of 645 AI startups, across 19 industries and 41 countries, which raised $5.85bn in 2024, and five to look out for in 2025.

• Hundreds of statistics on AI development, adoption, risks and scale explored under ten key trends.

 

What's Covered in This Report?

• Software

 1. ​Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

 2. Ensemble Models

 3. Custom Models

 4. Agents

 5. Semantic Layers

• Safety

 6. Risks & Regulations

 7. Evaluations & Testing

 8. Governance & Tooling​

• ​Scale

 9. Data Centers

10. Energy Demands