If AI adoption was a pervasive trend in 2024, then 2025 promises full-scale AI domination. Companies of all kinds will continue to explore how best to leverage AI, monetize AI products and services, and in some cases, protect themselves from obsolescence. AI itself will continue to evolve in the year to come, potentially delivering greater value by becoming less reliant on human engagement. In our annual year-end outlook, here are our AI (and non-AI) predictions for 2025:
1. Simple subscriptions won’t cut it for AI services
As companies continue to leverage AI to enhance business functions, many are also looking to monetize new AI-powered products and services. The huge costs associated with AI mean that those attempting to offer these services via simple subscriptions are doomed to fail. Allowing users to consume as much of an AI service as they like will quickly escalate costs for the provider and will make that user highly unprofitable. However, raising the price of the subscription could alienate existing customers and frighten away new ones. Monetizing AI services therefore demands a usage and consumption-based billing approach. As this realization sets in, B2C companies less accustomed to consumption billing models will seek to acquire sophisticated billing capabilities that will allow them to generate revenue from new AI products.
Read more on why flat-rate subscriptions will kill your AI dreams
2. Content creation platforms under threat of extinction
AI is continuing to cause an existential crisis for software companies that offer content creation services. This crisis will intensify in the year ahead, threatening to decimate legions of businesses. Look no further than Chegg, the once high-flying educational software company that is hemorrhaging customers and slashing employees, and has seen the value of its share price fall by an astounding 99%, due in large part to its losing battle with AI. Businesses and consumers will continue to discover that GenAI can do the same job as many of the content software platforms, but with improved quality, at lower cost, and without months of curation. Content creation companies must reinvent themselves entirely to survive the AI revolution.
3. Shift to AI web search to accelerate
AI’s impact on internet search will accelerate in 2025, prompting a shift from index-based search engines and a fine-tuning of SEO practices. GenAI-based search engines like SearchGPT will grow in popularity, offering greater interactivity and secondary searching, and will deliver clean and digestible results without the clutter of ads and sidebars that dominate the Google landscape today. The search results generated will also be more tailored, enabling users to find the information they are looking for more quickly. Businesses will need to keep up to date with SEO best practices if they are to rank well in the era of AI search.
4. A day of reckoning is coming for the software analyst community
AI is set to upend the community of industry analysts that evaluate and rank software services and providers. Instead of paying exorbitant fees and enduring vendor sales pitches, companies researching business software can simply ask GenAI engines to provide recommendations guided by their unique requirements and preferences. The insights and dynamic results delivered by GenAI will be more relevant to prospective buyers and will remove the personal viewpoints and inherent biases of human analysts from the equation. As more buyers turn to GenAI to evaluate software options, the weight third-party analyst endorsement used to carry will also wane. On the flipside, software providers will need to concern themselves with how they are portrayed in the results generated by AI searches.
5. With less human involvement and access to more data, the next wave of AI is here
Until now, the effectiveness of even the most sophisticated AI solution has relied on the quality of data and the language model upon which it was built. Some degree of human involvement and prompting has always been required. However, the next wave of GenAI – agentic RAG – is set to change this dynamic. With agentic RAG AI, systems can talk to one another and access data from external sources to find the information needed to respond to queries and solve problems, reducing the dependence on having a single monolithic (and very costly) LLM acting as the data source for every AI-based endeavor. As an added bonus, AI-based “agents” tend to have greater portability so can be inserted into multiple environments to deliver value more broadly to multiple audiences.
6. Consumer companies emphasize payments and simple billing
Not everything will be about AI in 2025. The continued expansion of payment methods will compel some companies, particularly in the B2C arena, to focus less on complex billing models and more on ensuring their customers can pay however they like. While P2P services like Zelle and Venmo have taken off in the US, most payment services are regional and are not available internationally. In India and other parts of Asia, for example, Paytm and PhonePe are popular payment services, while in Latin America, Elo, Boleto Bancario and Tarjeta Naranja are becoming more prevalent. In Europe, mobile wallets Google Pay and Apple Pay are gaining popularity, as are Buy Now, Pay Later services, such as Klarna and Clearpay. For companies doing business globally, expanding the array of available payment options will become critical to reaching the widest possible audience.
Ready to see how Aria can support your billing requirements in 2025 and beyond? Book a demo today.
