2025 Business Trends And How AI Is Shaping Them

by Linda

Federico Sendra, CEO and cofounder of SpaceDev, a consultancy and development services company with a focus on blockchain and web3.

Although there’s still some 2025 left, the contours of the year are clear: growth is uneven, capital is cautious and AI continues to rewrite business strategy as a structural force.

This is shown in statistic reports and adoption surveys (as we’ll see below), but it’s very likely that you’ve been seeing glimpses of it firsthand at your workplace. Leaders are being forced to rethink how they allocate capital, redesign jobs and set internal policy.

Capital Is Targeted Even Though Growth Is Sluggish

Global forecasts from the World Bank and IMF indicate that growth will hover around 3% in 2025 and into 2026. More important than the decimal points is the underlying story: executives are navigating such a scenario by concentrating resources on themes with long-term momentum. Energy transition, resilient supply chains and especially AI are attracting investment, even as other areas stagnate.

AI’s Energy Footprint: A Strategic Variable

AI’s infrastructure demands are now on par with heavy industry. The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity use could more than double by 2030, reaching nearly 945 terawatt-hours. Site selection, supply chain reliability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) positioning are becoming board-level strategic issues.

Organizations planning large-scale AI adoption will increasingly find themselves in conversations about power grids, cooling systems and regulatory frameworks. Utilities and hyperscalers are already co-designing solutions such as demand-response systems, but every business building on cloud infrastructure will feel the knock-on effects in pricing and availability.

AI And Business Decisions

The examples piling up show just how structural AI has become. For example, one of the world’s biggest banks, UBS, has rolled out in-house AI assistants to tens of thousands of employees, decommissioning legacy applications and reshaping workflows from onboarding to research access. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs has demonstrated that AI can draft the majority of an IPO prospectus in minutes, radically compressing workflows.

A survey from McKinsey suggests that over 70% of companies are now using GenAI in at least one function, most often in marketing, product development and service operations. However, adoption alone doesn’t guarantee value. BCG’s 2025 research shows that outcomes depend on workflow redesign and frontline enablement, not just licenses.

Finally, a survey by Gusto reported that nearly half of U.S. workers are already using AI without management approval, sometimes paying out of pocket, which means HR and legal teams are yet to catch up with policy.

Everything points to a new reality: AI is an integral part of capital allocation, organizational design and risk management.

What To Do Next

If the first wave of AI was about exploration, this next phase looks like integration: leaders cannot afford to treat AI as an optional tool. The companies gaining ground are those approaching it as part of their long-term operating model, embedding it into investment strategies, workflows and culture.

The first step is to treat AI as a capital program, creating a multi-year envelope that specifies how much revenue is committed, which functions are prioritized and when legacy systems will be retired. UBS’s decision to replace dozens of applications with a single AI assistant is a strong reminder that scaling requires not just addition but consolidation. Without a roadmap, organizations risk ballooning costs and irregular adoption.

Equally important is the shift in how results are measured. Counting licenses or user logins does little to prove value. Instead, leaders should tie AI initiatives to hard metrics such as cycle time reduction, first-contact resolution rates or incremental revenue per sales seat. In my own work, pilots only gained real traction once outputs were linked to these kinds of outcomes. AI adoption without redesigned workflows often led to duplication and not real efficiency.

Shadow AI use deserves just as much attention. Employees are experimenting on their own, and while this shows initiative, it also introduces risks around data security and compliance. I don’t think the solution is to crack down, but to channel it: publish a responsible-use policy, maintain a clear list of approved tools and empower “AI champions” at the frontline. As grassroots adoptions turn into structured enablement, companies capture both the creativity and the control.

Finally, leaders must rethink how roles and skills are defined. AI is hollowing out the repetitive tasks that once defined junior jobs, while elevating the value of judgment, oversight and relationship-building. Organizations that don’t adapt will risk demotivating talent or creating bottlenecks. The smarter path is to redesign job ladders around AI-mediated work and to invest in AI fluency as a baseline competency. Not every employee needs to code, but everyone should understand how AI outputs are generated and where their limits lie.

These moves require iteration. To thrive, companies don’t need to pick a perfect strategy on day one, but they should invest time and money toward prototyping, measuring, refining and scaling quickly. Pilots in “safe-to-fail” areas—whether semantic search, document drafting or customer service chat—offer valuable insights. What matters is building the feedback loops and governance to move from pilot to production without losing momentum.

Final Takeaways

2025 is shaping up as the year when AI shifts from optional to structural. The macroeconomic environment may be slow, but that only raises the premium on productivity gains and smarter allocation of resources.

The lesson for leaders is thus: AI should no longer be seen as a tool you adopt, but as an operating system you design around. Treat it as capital, measure it by value, guide its usage responsibly and reimagine the roles people play in such a world. Those who can do this will set the pace instead of just keeping it.

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