All year long I monitor my annual predictions, taking note when events either make me a fool or a sage. 2025 marked perhaps the most unpredictable and frustrating year of them all – and that’s not nothing, given I started prognosticating in 2003. But then again, I did expect an odd one – from my 2025 post: “This isn’t going to be a normal year. 2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises.”
I titled my post “Tech Takes the Power Position.” While I didn’t make that sentiment one of my specifically numbered predictions, it did provide the context for how I was thinking about the year ahead. “We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure…But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence…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.” …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.”
I certainly think that sentiment has proven out over the past 12 months – the tech industry is an indisputable driver of the tragicomedy currently playing out across American society.
But what of my specific predictions? Let’s roll the tape:
- TikTok will continue to operate in the US. Check. Not only did TikTok continue to operate, the administration recently announced a sweetheart deal that addresses none of the original issues raised (by Trump!) in the first place (save making various cronies rich on the arbitrage). I’ve never been a fan of the TikTok ban, nor of TikTok itself, but I certainly got this one right.
- There will be no meaningful regulation of Big Tech. Check again. Perhaps this was too easy to predict, and I should have gone further: There will be meaningful deregulation of Big Tech. At the state level, more than 30 AI related regulations passed, but that was greeted with an executive order attempting to reinterpret the Constitution so as to mollify Trump’s tech bro donors.
- 2025 will not be the year AI agents take off. Check. Three in a row! If you are merrily employing agents to do your bidding across the Internet, please let me know. So far, consumer agents remain a pipe dream, and enterprise agents have been slow to move beyond the kind of automations most companies already have hard coded. “No one knows what the hell an AI agent is” declared Techcrunch last spring. “Agentic commerce is still a collective hallucination,” proclaimed industry trade Marketecture this Fall. I have written about this story all year long and will keep focusing on it next year, so if you want more, just stay tuned!
- 2025 will be the year Gen AI gets boring – and better. Check. I think this also proved true. The term “boring” is certainly disputable – but my point was that it would be a year of evolution, not major leaps forward, and that’s certainly been the case. Products got better, usage kept going up and to the right, and, as I wrote: “2025 is the year Gen AI is put to work doing boring, useful things for us.”
- Streaming becomes a big time events platform. Check. OK, so I asked Claude if I got this right and it said “The streaming landscape has dramatically expanded in 2025, with major platforms now securing exclusive rights to marquee live events that were traditionally broadcast on linear television.” So AI thinks I got it right! Then again, one should always check the facts when it comes to AI, amiright? So what happened in 2025? Well, WWE Raw began streaming exclusively on Netflix, as did the Jake Paul vs. Anthony Joshua fight. The NFL had exclusives all over the streaming world (Prime, Netflix, Peacock, and YouTube), the SAG awards were streamed exclusively on Netflix, and just as I was preparing this post, The Oscars announced an exclusive deal with YouTube. Check!
- Prompt data becomes the new gold standard. Push. This one is harder to support. First a bit of explanation – in my prediction, I wrote “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).” But did that happen this year? Certainly by Google and OpenAI, to both improve their AI products and develop their advertising systems. And I’ve met with dozens of interesting startups that are working in the space in one way or another. But did prompt data become a fungible class of data like, say, retail or financial data? Not really. I’m going to give myself a push here. I think I was right, but can’t prove it yet.
- Retail media will consolidate. Push. There were too many deals to list over the past 12 months related to the retail media network world. But here are a few: DoorDash & Symbiosys, Pinterest & TVScientific, Instacart & OpenAI, Kroger & Omnicom; oh, right: Omnicom & IPG, which was driven in part by the data-driven nature of RMNs. But then again, we saw a bunch of new RMNs either launch or expand significantly, including Home Depot (OrangeApron), Ace Hardware (RedVest – see a trend here?), Best Buy Marketplace, Kroger Precision Marketing, and “shoppable TV” from Walmart’s Vizio integration. So perhaps true consolidation in this space is still a year or two off…I’ll give myself half credit on this one for now.
- Apple will be in open warfare with OpenAI. Whiff. I was sure Apple’s 2024 OpenAI deal was provisional, and that Apple would end up selling its “consumer surfaces” to the highest bidder (IE Google). But that didn’t happen in 2025 – likely because both parties were waiting for Google’s antitrust remedies related to their search megadeal. Now that the suit has been resolved (quite favorably for both), I’d look for more Google-Apple news in 2026. And while I’m quite sure Apple is no fan of OpenAI, it keeps those feelings private. “Open warfare” never really broke out. My first big miss.
- A Trump/Musk fallout? No. A burnout? Yes. Push. Well, this one is tricky. Was there a fallout? Yes. But did it settle down into a negotiated truce (a “burnout”)? Again, yes. Here’s what I wrote: “By year’s end, Musk and Trump will have tired of each other, preferring to do business with each other through proxies…both Musk and Trump are smart enough to realize they need each other – so they’ll avoid an all out press battle.” For the most part, that is how the story played out, but it did get ugly there back in the spring. I think I got this one mostly right, but missed what should have been obvious: When two billionaire narcissists split, they’ll always be a spectacle.
- Google gets a new CEO. Major Whiff. In fact, just the opposite happened. When Bloomberg writes a piece titled “Sundar Pichai Is Google’s Wartime CEO After All,” you know you missed the mark, even if it seemed like you were correct at the start of the year. I’ll take the L here, and tip my hat to Sundar’s extraordinary comeback.
- Health at the center. Check. This was a pretty broad prediction, but my main point was this: “Next to tech politics, the healthcare industry will be the most interesting story of 2025.” I stand by that statement, even if it’s entirely subjective. I had a front row seat to that story all year long through DOC, and the pace is only increasing. From policy (RFK’s vaccine panels, Medicare and ObamaCare at the center of a government shutdown) to breakthroughs in AI and cancer, women’s health, and many other fields, 2025 was a huge year for health. I expect that to only continue.
- Crypto goes sideways. Check. With this prediction, I was guessing that the crypto craze would push prices up and up, but as with all pump and dump schemes, the market would end up finding the floor by year’s end. And that’s pretty much what happened. Bitcoin, which serves as a proxy for the market overall, started the year at around $92,000. It climbed to nearly $125,000 by mid year, but has been languishing back at $88,000 or so as of this writing. But wasn’t it a fun ride?!
Ok, checking my self-graded homework – that’s 7 of 12 right, 2 of 13 wrong, and 3 pushes. Not bad! Look for my 2026 Predictions in a week or so, and have yourself a merry holiday season!
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