Global AI in 2025: From "Hype" to "Hard Work"

You have probably read a ton of 2025 summary posts by now, but perhaps you will take a moment to read one more. This is our very subjective selection of just a few trends or events that seemed important to us over the course of the past year. You may disagree with both our selection and our conclusions – but hey, this is not really meant to be a serious analysis 🙂

If 2023 was the year of fascination and 2024 the year of growing implementations, we will remember 2025 as the year AI “grew up” and achieved business and scientific maturity. We stopped asking “what can it do?” and started demanding: “do it safely and cheaply (and all by yourself!)”.

Here are 5 events and trends that we think defined the global AI technology scene in the past year:

1️⃣ The Era of “Reasoning Models” (System 2 Thinking) has arrived, putting an end to immediate next-word prediction. The year 2025 belonged to models that “think” and plan before answering. New generations of models like the o3 series from Open AI and Gemini from Google showed that AI can plan in multiple stages, verify its own mistakes, and solve mathematical problems at a doctoral level. This changed the rules of the game in science and programming. Yes we can’t believe this only happened in 2025 either 🙂

2️⃣ Autonomous Agents Enter the Game 🕵️‍♂️ Chatbots are no longer generating excitement. In 2025, we saw the rise of Agentic AI – systems that not only generate text but also perform work with some level of autonomy: booking flights, managing supply chains or perhaps maybe even negotiating simple contracts. AI ceased to be a consultant and became an executive employee, forcing a redefinition of many business processes. And with the rise of agent-to-agent protocols entering the mainstream (such as the Google UCP, showcased in the Walmart integration) the potential seems endless. 

3️⃣ Infrastructure and Energy: Nuclear for AI! A lot of focus shifted from chip availability to electricity availability. Major partnerships between Big Tech and the nuclear energy sector (both SMRs and the reactivation of old units) became a fact – which could fuel not just the further rise on AI capabilities, but a long-overdue revival of innovation in the nuclear power industry. In 2025, we understood that AI sovereignty is not just algorithms, it’s also the infrastructure to create and power them. 

4️⃣ Generative Video and the End of “Visual Truth” 🎥 The public release of advanced text-to-video models (like Sora or Veo class) is blurring the line between reality and fiction. Hollywood and the advertising industry are going into a tumultuous period, and the world faces a growing challenge of mass disinformation, underlining the importance of universally implementing robust content watermarking standards. This could also spell a return to verified sources of information, where trust will be the “new new oil” and all of us who have creative souls but clumsy fingers – our time has come! 

5️⃣ The Regulatory Rupture: Brussels vs. The Rest of the World ⚖️ While in Europe companies have to adapt to the sometimes cryptic and risk-averse AI Act as it began entering into force, the USA and China set a course for deregulation and acceleration. The year 2025 highlighted the gap between a “safe Europe” and a “fast world”, forcing global corporations to adopt “two-speed” strategies. The end of the year brought some recognition to this issue from the EC with the new Digital Omnibus package, which is a cautious and small step in the right direction. 

We enter the year 2026 with many questions, but full of excitement. The pace of AI innovation shows no signs of slowing down and if even titanic minds like Andriy Karpathy feel they can’t keep up with this breakneck speed, who can? What a time to be alive.  

How do you rate this year? Which of these trends affected your business the most? 👇

#GlobalAI #TechTrends2025 #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #AgenticAI #EnergyTransition #BusinessTech