We’re midway through 2025, and it’s evident that the state of AI has moved from labs to the front lines of business.
New research from Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) reveals that, in the U.S., enterprise adoption of generative AI more than doubled, rising from 33% in 2023 to 71% in 2024,1 while U.S. businesses invested over $109 billion in AI last year, more than the next 11 countries combined.2
Even more strikingly, the Mary Meeker AI trends report highlights the unprecedented pace of innovation. Powerful AI model releases grew 167% annually since 2020, with large-scale models rising 1,150% between 2022 and 2024.3
What does this staggering pace of acceleration mean for businesses and brands? We unpack five critical shifts based on the trends and insights found in the two reports.
1. AI capabilities are growing fast and getting more accessible
AI systems are now outperforming humans on complex reasoning tasks, including scoring 92.3% on the massive multitask language understanding (MMLU) benchmark, compared to the average human score of 89.8%.4 This leap has been powered by a 150% annual improvement in performance over the past six years, driven by faster chips and more advanced compute clusters.5
This acceleration isn’t just about capability, it’s about access. Between 2022 and 2024, the cost of running inference for advanced systems dropped more than 280 fold.6 Meanwhile, hardware costs declined by 30% annually and energy efficiency improved by 40% each year,7 making enterprise-scale AI adoption significantly more viable.
2. AI is the new front door, and it’s transforming creative testing
AI is changing how customers discover and interact with businesses, often before they visit a site. As the Meeker report notes, chatbots are becoming a key entry point, making AI the “front door” to the brand. Meanwhile, interest in AI agents has surged, with Google searches rising 1,088% over the past 16 months.8 Stanford’s report also shows that agentic AI is automating multistep tasks like campaign personalization, turning creative production into a high-speed, high-impact engine.9
Interest in AI agents has surged, with Google searches rising 1,088% over the past 16 months.
The economics are shifting too. With the cost of generating a high-quality AI image now under $0.01, marketers can scale A/B testing like never before — experimenting with visual, copy, and offer variations at near-zero cost.
3. Sentiment varies — and so does trust
Optimism around AI is high, but it is not evenly distributed. In Indonesia, 80% of people view AI positively, compared to 39% in the U.S.10 That divergence is critical for global brands; the same experience may be perceived very differently depending on the market.
Meanwhile, public scrutiny is growing. AI-related incidents rose 56.4% year over year in 2024, hitting a record high of 233 globally.11 Transparency remains a work in progress. Only 13 of the top 100 foundation models assessed by Stanford met its benchmarks.
For marketers, this highlights the growing need to prioritize trust, ensuring that AI-powered experiences are not only effective but also fair, explainable, and aligned with brand values.
4. AI-human collaboration is the norm
Automation isn’t the headline anymore; augmentation is. In Stanford’s analysis of over four million real-world AI use cases, 57% enhanced human output rather than replacing it.12
That pattern is reshaping hiring. AI-related IT job postings in the U.S. rose by 448% since 2016, while non-AI IT postings declined by 9%.13 In marketing and product teams, AI assistants are accelerating tasks, from concepting campaigns to analyzing results, letting human teams focus on strategy and creativity.
5. A new internet experience is taking shape
Roughly a third of the world — 2.6 billion people — is still offline.14 As connectivity expands via mobile and satellite, many will come online for the first time through AI-native interfaces.
That means discovery won’t always begin with a search box. As the Meeker report outlines, the shift from graphical user interfaces to linguistic user interfaces — driven by chat, voice, and multimodal AI — is now underway. For marketers, this means new entry points, new expectations, and new ways to deliver value.
These emerging shifts across accessibility, trust, creativity, and interaction models show just how embedded AI is becoming across the business ecosystem. For marketers, staying ahead means not just adopting new tools but understanding the broader shifts in trends that are shaping the landscape.
