The State of AI in 2025
By Joachim Sandgaard, Executive Director, Sandgaard Capital
AI Beyond the Hype
2025 marks a turning point: AI has shifted from experimentation to essential infrastructure. What began as tools for niche teams are now embedded across industries, reshaping workflows, strategy, and competition.
Adoption at Scale
Enterprise: Over 70% of companies report regular use of generative AI. The focus has moved from pilots to redesigning business processes.
Consumers: More than 60% of U.S. adults use AI, but only a fraction pay for premium services — signaling untapped monetization potential.
Agents, Not Tools: AI is evolving from assistants to autonomous “agents,” capable of planning and executing tasks with minimal oversight.
Value & Differentiation
The real gains come when firms re-engineer workflows around AI, instead of layering it on. Leaders are building governance, training, and change management into their rollouts — while laggards struggle with ad-hoc adoption.
Risks & Governance
AI’s growth brings challenges: accuracy, IP, privacy, and environmental impact. The International AI Safety Report highlights risks from cyber misuse to deepfakes. Governments are racing to regulate — with the U.S. favoring innovation-first, the EU taking a risk-based stance, and others pursuing state-led strategies.
Infrastructure Race
Compute remains the bottleneck. Mega-projects like OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank’s $500B Stargate data center initiative show the scale of investment required. At the same time, edge AI and sovereign national models are gaining traction to reduce dependency on a few global players.
Outlook
AI is no longer about proving potential — it’s about scaling responsibly. The winners will be those who:
Build trustworthy, auditable systems
Invest in compute and edge infrastructure
Deploy specialized, modular AI rather than one-size-fits-all models
Treat safety and governance as competitive advantages
Closing
2025 is the year AI becomes unavoidable. The question is not if it changes industries, but how responsibly organizations harness it. Those who align innovation with trust and resilience will lead the next decade.