The year 2025 marks a pivotal moment in the journey of Generative AI (Gen AI). What began as a fascinating technological novelty has now evolved into a critical tool for businesses across various industries.
Generative AI: From Solution Searching for a Problem to Problem-Solving Powerhouse
The initial surge of Gen AI enthusiasm was driven by the raw novelty of interacting with large language models (LLMs), which are trained on vast public data sets. Businesses and individuals alike were rightfully captivated with the ability to type in natural language prompts and receive detailed, coherent responses from the public frontier models. The human-esque quality of the outputs from LLMs led many industries to charge headlong into projects with this new technology, often without a clear business problem to solve or any real KPI to measure success. While there have been some great value unlocks in the early days of Gen AI, it is a clear signal we are in an innovation (or hype) cycle when businesses abandon the practice of identifying a problem first, and then seeking a workable technology solution to solve it.
In 2025, we expect the pendulum to swing back. Organizations will look to Gen AI for business value by first identifying problems that the technology can address. There will surely be many more well funded science projects, and the first wave of Gen AI use cases for summarization, chatbots, content and code generation will continue to flourish, but executives will start holding AI projects accountable for ROI this year. The technology focus will also shift from public general-purpose language models that generate content to an ensemble of narrower models which can be controlled and continually trained on the distinct language of a business to solve real-world problems which impact the bottom line in a measurable way.
2025 will be the year AI moves to the core of the enterprise. Enterprise data is the path to unlock real value with AI, but the training data needed to build a transformational strategy is not on Wikipedia, and it never will be. It lives in contracts, customer and patient records, and in the messy unstructured interactions that often flow through the back office or live in boxes of paper.. Getting that data is complicated, and general purpose LLMs are a poor technology fit here, notwithstanding the privacy, security and data governance concerns. Enterprises will increasingly adopt RAG architectures, and small language models (SLMs) in private cloud settings, allowing them to leverage internal organizational data sets to build proprietary AI solutions with a portfolio of trainable models. Targeted SLMs can understand the specific language of a business and nuances of its data, and provide higher accuracy and transparency at a lower cost point – while staying in line with data privacy and security requirements.
The Critical Role of Data Scrubbing in AI Implementation
As AI initiatives proliferate, organizations must prioritize data quality. The first and most crucial step in implementing AI, whether using LLMs or SLMs, is to ensure that internal data is free from errors and inaccuracies. This process, known as “data scrubbing,” is essential for the curation of a clean data estate, which is the lynchpin for the success of AI projects.
Many organizations still rely on paper documents, which need to be digitized and cleaned for day to day business operations. Ideally, this data would flow into labeled training sets for an organization's proprietary AI, but we are early days in seeing that happen. In fact, in a recent survey we conducted in collaboration with the Harris Poll, where we interviewed more than 500 IT decision-makers between August-September, found that 59% of organizations aren’t even using their entire data estate. The same report found that 63% of organizations agree that they have a lack of understanding of their own data and this is inhibiting their ability to maximize the potential of GenAI and similar technologies. Privacy, security and governance concerns are certainly obstacles, but accurate and clean data is critical, even slight training errors can lead to compounding issues which are challenging to unwind once an AI model gets it wrong. In 2025, data scrubbing and the pipelines to ensure data quality will become a critical investment area, ensuring that a new breed of enterprise AI systems can operate on reliable and accurate information.
The Expanding Impact of the CTO Role
The role of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has always been crucial, but its impact is set to expand tenfold in 2025. Drawing parallels to the “CMO era,” where customer experience under the Chief Marketing Officer was paramount, the coming years will be the “generation of the CTO.”
While the core responsibilities of the CTO remain unchanged, the influence of their decisions will be more significant than ever. Successful CTOs will need a deep understanding of how emerging technologies can reshape their organizations. They must also grasp how AI and the related modern technologies drive business transformation, not just efficiencies within the company's four walls. The decisions made by CTOs in 2025 will determine the future trajectory of their organizations, making their role more impactful than ever.
The predictions for 2025 highlight a transformative year for Gen AI, data management, and the role of the CTO. As Gen AI moves from being a solution in search of a problem to a problem-solving powerhouse, the importance of data scrubbing, the value of enterprise data estates and the expanding impact of the CTO will shape the future of enterprises. Organizations that embrace these changes will be well-positioned to thrive in the evolving technological landscape.
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