We asked OpenAI’s o1 about the top AI trends in 2025 — here’s a look into our conversation

AI is already reshaping industries and society on a global scale. IDC predicts that AI will contribute $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030, comprising 3.5% of GDP. This momentum is exemplified by the recent announcement of “Project Stargate,” a partnership to invest up to $100 billion in new AI-focused data center capacity. This is all indicative of the tremendous activity going on with AI development. On a single day, AI made headlines for discovering proteins to counteract cobra venom, creating a Star Trek-style universal translator and paving the way for true AI assistants. 

These and other developments highlight individual achievements, as well as their interconnected progress. This flywheel of innovation is where breakthroughs in one domain amplify advancements in others, compounding AI’s transformative potential.

Separating signal from noise

Even for someone who follows AI developments closely, the rapid technological breakthroughs and diffusion across industries and applications is dizzying, making it highly challenging to not only know and understand what is going on, but understand the relative importance of developments. It is challenging to separate the signal from noise. 

In the past, I might have turned to an AI industry analyst to help explain the dynamics and meaning of recent and projected developments. This time, I decided instead to see if AI itself might be able to help me. This led me to a conversation with OpenAI’s o1 model. The 4o model might have worked as effectively, but I expected that a reasoning model such as o1 might be more effective. 

I asked o1 what it thought were the top AI trends and why. I started by asking for the top 10 to 15, but over the course of our collaborative dialog, this expanded to 25. Yes, there really are that many, which is a testament to AI’s value as a general-purpose technology. 

After about 30 seconds of inference-time “thinking,” o1 responded with a list of trends in AI development and use, ranked according to their potential significance and impact on business and society. I asked several qualifying questions and made a few suggestions that led to slight changes in the evaluation method and rankings. 

Methodology

Rankings of the various AI trends are determined by a blended heuristic that balances multiple factors including both quantitative indicators (near-term commercial viability) and qualitative judgments (disruptive potential and near-term societal impact) further described as follows: 

• Current commercial viability: The trend’s market presence and adoption.
• Long term disruptive potential: How a trend could significantly reshape industries and create new markets.
• Societal impact: Weighing the immediate and near-term effects on society, including accessibility, ethics and daily life.
  

In addition to the overall AI trend rankings, each trend receives a long-term social transformation score (STS), ranging from incremental improvements (6) to civilization-altering breakthroughs (10). The STS reflects the trend’s maximum potential impact if fully realized, offering an absolute measure of transformational significance.

The development of this ranking process reflects the potential of human-AI collaboration. o1 provided a foundation for identifying and ranking trends, while my human oversight helped ensure that the insights were contextualized and relevant. The result shows how humans and AI can work together to navigate complexity.

Top AI trends in 2025

For tech leaders, developers and enthusiasts alike, these trends signal both immense opportunity and significant challenges in navigating the many changes brought by AI. Highly-ranked trends typically have broad current adoption, high commercial viability or significant near-term disruptive effects.

Honorable mention list: AI trends 11 – 25

One can quibble whether number 11 or any of the following should be in the top 10, but keep in mind that these are relative rankings and include a certain amount of subjectivity (whether from o1 or from me), based on our iterative conversation. I suppose this is not too different from the conversations that take place within any research organization when completing their reports ranking the comparative merits of trends. In general, this next set of trends has significant potential but are either: 1) not yet as widespread and/or 2) have a potential payoff that is still several or more years away.

While these trends did not make the top 10, they showcase the expanding influence of AI across healthcare, sustainability and other critical domains. 

Digital humans show the innovation flywheel in action

One use case that highlights the convergence of these trends is digital humans, which exemplify how foundational and emerging AI technologies come together to drive transformative innovation. These AI-powered avatars create lifelike, engaging interactions and span roles such as digital coworkers, tutors, personal assistants, entertainers and companions. Their development shows how interconnected AI trends create transformative innovations. 

For example, these lifelike avatars are developed using the capabilities of generative AI (trend 1) for natural conversation, explainable AI (2) to build trust through transparency and agentic AI (3) for autonomous decision-making. With synthetic data generation, digital humans are trained on diverse, privacy-preserving datasets, ensuring they adapt to cultural and contextual nuances. Meanwhile, edge AI (5) enables near real-time responsiveness and multi-modal AI (17) enhances interactions by integrating text, audio and visual elements. 

By using the technologies described by these trends, digital humans exemplify how advancements in one domain can accelerate progress in others, transforming industries and redefining human-AI collaboration. As digital humans continue to evolve, they not only exemplify the flywheel of innovation, but also underscore the transformative potential of AI to redefine how humans interact with technology.

Why are AGI and ASI so far down the list?

The future is, indeed, hard to predict. Many expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) to be achieved soon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said recently: “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.” However, that is different from saying that AGI is imminent. It also does not mean that all agree on the definition of AGI. For OpenAI, this means “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” 

Mark Zuckerberg said he believes that in 2025 Meta will “have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer” that can write code. That is clearly economically viable work and could be used to claim the arrival of AGI. Perhaps, but even Altman is now saying that AGI is not arriving soon.

Google Deepmind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said recently on the Big Technology podcast that AGI is likely “a handful of years away.” He added, however, that there is a 50% chance another one or two significant breakthroughs on the order of the transformer model that led to generative AI will still be needed to fully achieve AGI.

Superintelligence, too, could eventually be achieved in the next 5 to 10 years. Altman and Elon Musk have said as much, although the consensus expert opinion is closer to 2040 — and some believe it will never be achieved. Amara’s Law reminds us that we tend to overestimate the effect of any technology in the short run and underestimate the effect eventually. If achieved, the impact of superintelligence would be enormous — but at present, this “if” precludes this from the top 10 list. 

Choosing the right AI collaborator(s)

After taking on this venture, I discovered some crucial elements to consider in the choice of AI collaborators. While o1 offered valuable insights into leading AI trends, its cutoff date for training data was October 2023, and it lacks web browsing capabilities. This became clear when it initially suggested No. 12 for agentic AI, a trend that has advanced rapidly in the last several months. Rerunning the analysis with the 4o model, which includes web browsing, led to a more proper ranking of agentic AI at No. 3.

Per ChatGPT: “Apologies for any confusion earlier. Given the rapid advancements and the significant attention agentic AI is receiving in 2025, it would be appropriate to rank it at No. 3 on the list of top AI trends. This adjustment reflects its growing impact and aligns with recent analyses highlighting its importance.”  

In much the same way, I had a conversation with o1 about the placement of AI in education, healthcare and life sciences. However, 4o suggested that their order in the ranking be reversed, that healthcare should be No. 11, and education No. 12. 

I agreed with the rationale and switched the order. These examples show both the challenges and benefits of working with the latest AI chatbots, and both the necessity and value of human and machine collaboration. 

Social transformation rankings

Below is a summary of the STS rankings, offering a comparative view of the top 25 AI trends for 2025 and their potential long-term impact. These rankings highlight how AI trends vary in their potential to reshape society, from near-term enablers like generative AI and agentic AI, to longer-term innovations such as quantum AI and brain-computer interfaces.

Navigating AI’s transformative impact

While some AI breakthroughs are here now or seem just around the corner, others like AGI and ASI remain speculative, reminding us that there is much more to come from AI technologies. Yet it is already clear that AI, in all its manifestations, is reshaping human affairs in ways likely to become even more profound over time. These changes will extend to daily life and could even challenge our understanding of what it means to be human.

As AI continues to redefine industries and society, we are only at the beginning of a dramatic technological renaissance. These trends, ranging from generative models to humanoid robots powered by AI, highlight both the promise and complexity of integrating AI into our lives. 

What is particularly striking about these 25 trends is not just their individual significance, but the interconnectedness of their progress. This flywheel of AI innovation will continue to amplify progress, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of breakthroughs that redefine industries and society. As these trends evolve, revisiting this analysis in six to 12 months could reveal changes in the rankings and how the flywheel of innovation continues to accelerate progress across industries.

Leaders, developers and society must monitor these advancements and ensure they are directed toward fair outcomes, striking a balance between innovation and responsibility. The next five years will define AI’s trajectory — whether it becomes a tool for societal benefit or a source of disruption. The choice is ours.

Gary Grossman is EVP of technology practice at Edelman and global lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.