2025 marked a decisive shift in how AI is shaping organisations.
Developed in collaboration with Faire Group,A Year in AI 2025: Signals, Shifts & the New Shape of Organisational Leadershipreflects on the year in which AI moved from experimentation into organisational infrastructure. The paper examines how this shift reshaped strategy, capability, and leadership, and why many organisations are now constrained less by technology than by readiness, alignment, and execution.
The report identifies eight signals that surfaced repeatedly across organisations in 2025 — patterns that reveal how AI is now influencing customer expectations, operating models, governance, economics, and leadership behaviour.
As AI became embedded in everyday consumer experiences, expectations for immediacy, personal relevance, and conversational fluency accelerated faster than most enterprise systems could respond, turning customer experience into a credibility test rather than a service feature.
Signal 2
The platform layer solidified.
In 2025, competition shifted from individual models to ecosystems, with organisations increasingly choosing platforms not just for raw capability, but also for their ability to support workflows, governance, memory, and long-term organisational coherence.
Signal 3
Agentic workflows started to become operational.
Advances in reasoning, tool use, and orchestration moved AI agents from fragile prototypes into reliable operational colleagues, capable of planning, acting, and executing across real business workflows.
Signal 4
Compute, energy and geopolitics became strategic levers.
AI revealed its physical reality in 2025, with access to compute, energy availability, and geopolitical constraints becoming decisive factors shaping the feasibility, cost, and resilience of organisational AI ambitions.
Signal 5
Regulation shifted from principles to practice.
Regulation moved decisively into operational reality, forcing organisations to embed governance, documentation, and accountability into AI systems from the outset, and revealing governance as an enabler of scale rather than a brake on innovation.
Signal 6
Developer productivity entered a new phase of acceleration.
Software development became increasingly conversational and agent-led, dramatically reducing the time and cost required to prototype, build, and evolve systems, and shifting the bottleneck from execution to clarity of intent.
Signal 7
Culture and capability became the dominant constraint on adoption.
Despite rapid technological progress, the primary limiter of AI value proved to be human readiness, with organisational culture, leadership behaviour, and workforce fluency determining who moved from pilots to production.
Signal 8
The price of intelligence: AI rewrote corporate finance.
AI disrupted traditional software economics, introducing variable, usage-driven cost structures that forced leaders to rethink budgeting, ROI, and value creation through the lens of intelligence as a strategic resource.
What these signals reveal
Taken together, the eight signals point to a fundamental shift. AI is no longer defined by novelty or experimentation, but by its integration into the core systems, economics, and behaviours of organisations. The challenge for leaders is no longer access to technology, but the ability to align strategy, governance, talent, and operating models around it.
A Year in AI 2025 captures this inflection point, offering leaders a framework to understand not just where AI is going, but what must change inside organisations to realise its value.
