AI in 2025: From Hype to Habit

Two years ago, AI was still treated like an experiment. Businesses dabbled, tested, and toyed with it, often with one eye on the hype and the other on the risk. Today, that phase is over.

In our 2023 white paper Supercharge Your Business with AI, we set out five predictions for how the technology would evolve. Two years on, those themes remain highly relevant — but with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see what came true, what's still evolving and where things are going next.

AI Becomes Everyday Infrastructure

Generative AI is now part of the fabric of work. It’s embedded into emails, spreadsheets, and code editors — no longer a novelty but an essential productivity layer. Yet, despite its ubiquity, AI still feels fragmented. Most tools operate in isolation, providing impressive one-off outputs but rarely working seamlessly across platforms or remembering the context of previous interactions.

The real step change will come when AI matures into a persistent assistant — one that can follow you between systems, retain context, and anticipate your needs rather than waiting for a prompt.

Human-in-the-Loop as the Default

One of our earliest predictions was that AI would only thrive alongside people, not in place of them. That’s exactly what’s happened. From content quality assurance to clinical decision support, humans remain firmly in the loop. Enterprises have embraced AI as a partner rather than a replacement.

The sticking point remains transparency. Too many systems still function like a black box, failing to explain how a decision was made or even making it clear whether the “voice” is human or machine. Building trust will depend on explainable AI and better signals for when AI is in play, ensuring people remain confident in the oversight they provide.

The Race to Personalisation

Customer experience has become one of the clearest battlegrounds for AI adoption. Streaming services, online retailers, and fintech pioneers have demonstrated the power of personalisation — whether through content recommendations, nudges to complete a purchase, or proactive financial alerts.

But the reality for most organisations, especially in B2B, is more complex. Data silos, regulatory hurdles, and privacy concerns make it difficult to deliver hyper-personalisation at scale. The future will shift from reactive suggestions to predictive, real-time experiences. With on-device AI and composable platforms, businesses are beginning to design customer journeys that are both deeply personal and privacy-conscious.

Smarter Search Behind the Scenes

If you’ve noticed customer service bots or knowledge tools becoming more helpful over the last two years, that’s largely thanks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). By combining generative AI with vector databases, businesses can now anchor outputs in relevant data, avoiding the “hallucinations” of earlier systems.

Still, deploying these systems at enterprise scale is not without friction. Performance tuning, security, and auditability remain technical hurdles. Encouragingly, frameworks such as LangChain and SDKs from players like Vercel are starting to reduce this complexity. The industry is also looking toward a universal standard — the Model Context Protocol — which could make enterprise AI systems far more reliable and interoperable in the years ahead.

Compliance as a Business Advantage

Perhaps the most striking development has been in regulation. With the EU AI Act passed in 2024, transparency and explainability are no longer theoretical ideals but hard requirements. Businesses have had to respond by building governance into their AI strategy from the ground up.

What’s missing is global alignment. Standards vary widely across the US, UK, EU, and APAC, leaving global organisations managing a patchwork of compliance regimes. Even so, ethical AI is quickly becoming more than a regulatory box to tick — it’s turning into a mark of quality. Governance frameworks like capAI point toward a future where compliance isn’t bolted on but baked into everyday operations, making trust and responsibility competitive differentiators.

Looking Ahead

The five predictions from 2023 have largely held true, but the deeper story is about maturity. AI is no longer the “next big thing” — it’s the operating system of modern business.

The leaders in this next phase won’t be those who deploy AI the fastest, but those who scale it responsibly, integrate it thoughtfully, and keep human experience at the centre. In a landscape where AI is everywhere, trust, clarity, and sustainability are the real differentiators.

Further Reading

You can download the new 2 page update and the original white paper here.