This isn't going to be a normal year.
2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We're not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration's cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology - capital is king - the subset of Big Tech bros who've bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as "techno optimism." The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk's approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.
One year ago, while reviewing the performance of my less-than-stellar 2023 predictions, I said that I'd learned my lesson: Going forward, I'd avoid prognosticating about Trump or politics, and I'd steer clear of wildcards like Musk and crypto. But here we are, one year later, and each of those topics? swirl around our once and future President. They're unavoidable - and very much in the news, regardless of the traditional holiday lull.
Since jotting down my initial list of 2025 predictions two weeks ago, several have already started to come true. The very first notion I had -- that TikTok will not be banned in the US --? looked like a counterintuitive call just last week. Thanks to a fresh Trump filing, the odds have shifted considerably. I also planned on predicting that Trump would have a serious falling out with his new tech bro besties. Again, the odds of that increased with this past week's imbroglio around H-1B visas.? I don't think immigration will be the issue that splits up our two favorite camps of narcissists, but it does offer a fine foreshadowing of fissures that could become chasms this coming year.
Regardless of politics, crypto, and Big Tech, there's plenty of other topics worth prognostication. So let's get to it, and let the chips fall where they may.
- TikTok will continue to operate in the US. As I said above, the odds of this coming to fruition got markedly higher with Trump's filing this past week. Regardless of his insistence that he and he alone can save TikTok, I think an outright ban of the platform is hard to defend on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court hears the case in ten short days, and I think they'll find a way to throw it back to Congress. Cans will be kicked, and TikTok might technically be banned for a spell, but by the end of the year, we'll likely have forgotten it ever was. Meanwhile...
- There will be no meaningful regulation of Big Tech. So much noise around Section 230, so little actual signal. We won't get a national data privacy policy, we won't get robust data portability, and we won't get any federal clarity about how to manage AI's impact on society. We will get a bit of this and a bit of that - mostly related to the same two issues that seem to dominate tech legislation: Intellectual property and pornography. Same as it ever was, regardless of the Big Tech Bros' influence.
- 2025 will not be the year AI agents take off. As the bloom came off the Generative AI rose in 2024, everyone started talking about AI agents as the Next Big Thing. Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon - all of them (and about a million startups) are trying to build user agents for both enterprise and consumer use cases. I'm a huge fan of the concept, but for now, it remains just that. Reasoning agents that book your travel, negotiate your insurance bills, or manage your calendar simply will not work if they are beholden to the same business models currently driving Big Tech. There's so, so much to say about why this is true, but I'll leave that for another series of posts.
- 2025 will be the year Gen AI gets boring - and better. That said, 2025 will be the year product teams take over the Gen AI agenda, and start building the kinds of things that help us in our everyday life. We got a glimpse of these kinds of products with Google's NotebookLM, and we'll see a lot more of them this coming year. Workflow optimization, automation, summarization, all the stuff that we kind of don't like to do? Gen AI can help with that, but not until good product leaders focus on building good products that are purpose fit for the task at hand. 2025 is the year Gen AI is put to work doing boring, useful things for us.
- Streaming becomes a big time events platform. It's taken too long, and the tech is still a bit glitchy, but the era of big time events on streaming is finally here. Last year we saw sports consolidate its hold on the streamers, and by year's end, Netflix proved the model with its Christmas NFL extravaganza. Tired of digital black boxes and 1.3-second ad impressions, brand advertisers hunger for platforms where they can reach big audiences with 15-30 second narrative spots. Streamers will spend the year concocting any number of "events" designed to capitalize on this trend: Sports, certainly, but we'll see Amazon, NBC, Netflix, Max, and all the rest fabricating any number of new kinds of tentpoles ready made for brand advertising.
- Prompt data becomes the new gold standard. One of my very first posts, more than 20 years ago, described "the database of intentions" created by our search queries. Over the years I've updated that post, adding all manner of new signals - location, status updates, social media, commerce data. 2025 will be the year that prompt data - the stream of input we create as we engage with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity etc - will become a commercial asset that drives markets. Tied to identity, prompt data provides one of the richest signals of what people want, need, and plan to purchase, and that is simply too valuable to not be leveraged by marketers (and Big Tech).
- Retail media will consolidate. Question: How many "retail media exchanges" are there today? Answer: Way too many! Yes, Amazon and Walmart are dominant, but did you know that Wayfair, CostCo, Best Buy, Kroger, Chase, and CVS have them too? And those are just the larger ones. Retailers have realized they're sitting on a gold mine of purchase data, but buyers of that data don't want to work with dozens of different vendors. And in the end, most retailers want to focus on what they're good at: Selling stuff. That augurs a consolidation in retail media - one that's going to accelerate throughout the year.
- Apple will be in open warfare with OpenAI. I was already leaning toward this prediction - I read Chris Messina's post last summer about Apple front-running OpenAI to maintain control of its iPhone customers. Most of us assume that "Apple Intelligence" will be an OpenAI competitor. Not exactly. Instead, it will be an "orifice" through which the highest bidder will pass (just as Google did with search). And that's a game OpenAI can't afford to win - so it'll find other ways to call Apple to the carpet. The press will love the fight, and it'll dominate tech headlines for at least a few months.
- A Trump/Musk fallout? No. A burnout? Yes. I alluded to this in the introduction, but let's formalize it here as a prediction: By year's end, Musk and Trump will have tired of each other, preferring to do business with each other through proxies. Sure, at least one of the DOGE boys will have his head on a spike, courtesy an unfettered Donald Trump. It takes a certain kind of quisling energy to stay in Trump's good graces for more than one year. I don't think any of the All-In crowd have it in them. However, both Musk and Trump are smart enough to realize they need each other - so they'll avoid an all out press battle.
- Google gets a new CEO. There have been intermittent calls for Sundar Pichai's head over the past few years - and all of them have petered out. It's hard to argue with Google's five year stock performance. But 2025 marks a decade for Pichai in his role, and the company faces all manner of structural and political obstacles. I'd predict that Google will announce a CEO succession process by year's end, if not earlier.
- Health at the center. Yes, RFK Jr. is a strange bird, but the health industry is due a shakeup, and it seems like it's coming, regardless of whether the Senate confirms an anti-vaxxer for the top government job. Next to tech politics, the healthcare industry will be the most interesting story of 2025.
- Crypto goes sideways. I'm stunned by the rise of crypto over the past few months - even if it does make a ton of sense given that the crypto lobby is pretty much the same folks who gave us DOGE. And I'm comfortable predicting that crypto will continue to "pump," at least for a while. But it's still too early for crypto to earn into any of the valuations its been given, and the sector will deflate by year's end. At present, bitcoin is having a hard time staying above $100K, and while it will likely pass that milestone comfortably throughout the year, by this time in 2025, it'll have come back down to earth. I think.?
And that's it, a dozen predictions for 2025. TikTok, regulation, AI, data, retail media, streaming, Apple, politics, Google, crypto, and health. Thanks for coming along for the ride, and we'll see how I did next December!
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Founder/CEO, BrandRank.AI, Urgent Optimist, Digital Transformation Leader, Author
1 个月Great list of predictions, John (as always). Agree on your agents "taking off" caution. I love your emphasis on the 'boring' part, but what's missing is the need to 'get back to boring' by nailing the basics of 'marketing to algorithms' in a simple, consumer-centric way. Long-ignored brand websites remain the #1 algorithmic anchor for favorable (and accurate) AI search results. Since we last exchanged emails, I’ve run thousands of audits—especially in CPG—and 90% of top brands suffer from “Answer Arthritis.” This gap between brand fundamentals and what LLMs deliver is only widening but impacting trust levels. This 'boring' work may not win Cannes awards, but it’s the highest ROI play—if you believe Answer Engines (text, voice, or multimodal formats) matter. As SEO shifts into AEO and more consumers turn to LLMs for product research (shockingly high now), this will become obvious. What will motivate brands to recognize this in 2025? Challenger brands and AI-first upstarts who naturally answer consumer questions (how to use a product, safety, ingredients). Even some of the newer shopper/LLM platforms like Amazon Rufus are now bringing this to light. Thx again for a great list of predictions and Happy New Year!
Working on something new in stealth
1 个月Musk and Andreessen as "evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as "techno optimism."? Dude. Isn't that exactly what early WIRED, of which you were a part, stood for?
Playback Experience, YouTube
2 个月Great predictions as always John, some I disagree with (I think Sundar will reign on as an AI first CEO) but others I’m 100% in support. Boy, I’d sure like the tech industry to be represented by someone other than the A hole in a K hole. But unfortunately I think the “world champ Diablo player” is here for the long haul.