25 Insights of 2025

 

Introduction

The year has been a whirlwind of both uncertainties and optimism. So where do we go from here? From data-backed research by leading business institutions around the globe, here are 25 insights from the year 2025. Stay informed with these trend developments in business strategies, macroenvironment shifts, consumer behaviors, technological advancements, product evolution, and talent landscape, and reference them to support and enhance your future decisions.

Business Strategies

2025 highlights a clear tension between technological ambition and realized value. Organizations continue directing meaningful portions of digital transformation budgets toward AI, yet much of the expected impact remains unreached. This gap is pushing leaders to tighten ROI discipline, monitor performance more systematically, and clarify where value is truly created.

Data monetization is rising quickly – expanding business models and accelerating the pressure to prove returns. At the same time, executives prioritize innovation while investors emphasize financial resilience, widening the need for clearer value narratives and balanced capital decisions.

Amid this, product organizations that anchor choices in customer outcomes – rather than delivery volume – consistently outperform. With Gen AI creating multiple possible futures, resilient strategies now rely on pressure-testing assumptions and ensuring value-centered decision-making across the enterprise.

Macroenvironment Shifts

Macroenvironment shifts reveal a landscape shaped by fast-moving technology, geopolitical realignment, and evolving societal expectations. Tech continues to act as the strongest tailwind, accelerating AI adoption, digitization, and data-led growth. At the same time, rising regulatory complexity, trust erosion, and workforce transitions create meaningful headwinds that require organizations to redesign operating models.

Geopolitical changes are redrawing trade corridors, exposing sectors to uneven upside depending on scenario outcomes – whether baseline, diversification, or fragmentation. These dynamics are already reshaping global manufacturing strategies, with regions evaluated through new tradeoffs in cost, speed, stability, and labor availability.

In response, organizations are turning to emergent structures – platform models, enterprise agility, and decentralized networks – to stay resilient, align operations to uncertainty, and position themselves for long-term competitiveness.

Consumer Behaviors

Consumer behavior is shaped by a widening tension between rising expectations and uneven brand execution. Customers want AI-powered personalization, seamless experiences, and greater transparency, yet satisfaction lags significantly – especially in data handling and automated support. This trust gap elevates privacy assurances as a core component of brand value.

AI-led interactions, however, demonstrate clear performance upside, driving lower bounce rates, higher engagement, and stronger revenue per visit. As digital journeys improve, measurement also evolves. New metrics such as the "attention quotient" and "commercial quotient" help brands understand how fragmented focus and platform sophistication translate into monetization potential.

Underlying these metrics is a shift toward attention-based segmentation. Seven distinct consumer groups now display markedly different spending behaviors, media habits, and responsiveness to advertising. Notably, top media consumers do not always equate to top spenders, underscoring the need for precise targeting and content strategies that match true commercial value rather than raw consumption volume.

Technological Advancements

Rapid advances in AI infrastructure, intelligent systems, and cybersecurity are creating both opportunity and operational pressure for organizations. A three-pronged capability stack is emerging: Architect technologies lay the foundation with confidential computing and AI-native platforms; Synthesist capabilities such as multi-agent systems and domain-specific models elevate intelligence; and Vanguard capabilities address future risks through digital provenance, geopatriation, and advanced cyber defense.

These advancements also reshape IT economics. While Gen AI may initially increase expenses, it can address up to half of IT costs and deliver meaningful efficiency gains when deployed thoughtfully. As spending reallocates toward AI-powered platforms, IT evolves into a strategic multiplier that reduces technical debt, strengthens shared capabilities, and accelerates business value.

Yet a critical caution underscores these developments: ROI projections often overlook technical debt, which can erode or even reverse expected benefits. Organizations that account for this early – and invest in modernization alongside innovation – can protect returns and position their technology strategy for sustainable impact.

Product Evolution

Products are driven by a shift from generic "smartness" to more intentional value delivery. Three buyer personas – Purpose Seekers, Comfort Seekers, and Efficiency Seekers – now shape product expectations, each prioritizing different advantages such as time savings, sustainability, or healthier living. Understanding these segments has become essential for creating differentiated, resonant value propositions.

Trust also plays a defining role. Consumers reward companies that pair innovation with strong data responsibility, with "Trusted Trailblazers" earning higher satisfaction and greater household spending than providers perceived as either overly aggressive or too cautious.

Despite rapid innovation cycles, many users feel disconnected from new features. While personalization and improvements are appreciated, a majority express that updates arrive too quickly or fail to address real problems. This tension highlights the growing need for product strategies that balance innovation velocity with meaningful, user-centered progress.

Talent Landscape

AI adoption is accelerating faster than workforce readiness, widening gaps between required and available skills. Shortages in areas like data science, machine learning, and algorithm development threaten momentum unless organizations scale focused skilling, reskilling, and mobility programs. Workers value AI's speed benefits yet still prefer human quality for judgment-driven tasks, reinforcing the need for hybrid workflows that balance efficiency with expertise.

Strong managers amplify the impact of scarce technical talent. High performers deliver outsized productivity gains and improve alignment across roles, while practices such as better role–skill matching, lateral paths, and rotational assignments increase retention of AI-native employees. Organizations that prioritize capability development and people leadership will be better positioned to sustain progress in an AI-driven labor market.

https://tinyurl.com/mw22cn6a

Linear Economic Model and Circular Business Strategies

 

Take, Make, Waste - Why Some Brands Plan for Obsolescence

The process of planning for obsolescence not only hurts consumer experience - leading to lower lifetime value but is also terrible for the environment. Here we look at reasons why good companies still plan for obsolescence.

Planned Obsolescence and The Linear Economy

If you have ever purchased a product only to find it break soon after the warranty has ended, you know the frustrations of planned obsolescence. According to Investopedia planned obsolescence is:

“A strategy of deliberately ensuring that the current version of a given product will become out of date or useless within a known time period. This proactive move guarantees that consumers will seek replacements in the future, thus bolstering demand.”

The process of planning for obsolescence not only hurts the consumer experience with a brand - leading to lower lifetime value but is also terrible for the environment.

When products are designed to break, the potential of their raw materials is not fully realized and instead often end up in landfills. Fresh raw materials are then required to manufacture new products. It’s a vicious cycle, with the environment taking the dual impact of raw materials extraction as well as an increase in waste.

With so many downsides, why do good companies focus efforts on making their products worse?

The Linear Economic Model

This is known as the linear economy, where raw materials are extracted and made into products that are then purchased, consumed and, ultimately, discarded. This process is often referred to as “take-make-waste”.

In a linear economy, value is created by producing and selling as many products as possible. This model grew out of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteen hundreds. While companies have found ways to make each step the process more efficient, little has changed to update the incentive structure put in place by take-make-waste.

It is this incentive structure that drives brands to do the illogical and design products to be worse, not better - hurting consumers and the environment in the process. It would be beneficial to all if these efforts were focused on a fair value exchange where consumers, brands and the environment could co-exist together in a beneficial way.

A New Way Forward

Luckily, consumers are voting with their dollars and demanding more from their products and the companies that produce them. We are currently undergoing a flight to quality in consumer goods that benefits companies that produce high-quality, long-lasting products — creating loyalty and ultimately driving an increase in lifetime value.

Additionally, sustainability is becoming a topic of increasing importance, with consumers again opting to purchase products from companies that produce products in a sustainable way and work to increase recycling.

This begs the question, if brands need to invest more in sustainable production while creating products that last longer, how can these brands stay in business? A new system is needed where value is exchanged between brands and consumers throughout a product's life and, finally, repaired, upcycled or recycled.

Circling in on Circularity

Circular business strategies are increasingly becoming a competitive advantage for those looking to strengthen their position in the market over others offering traditional one-time sales.

Earlier we broke down the linear economic model and how it creates incentive structures that cause companies to plan obsolescence into their products. This not only creates a frustrating consumer experience, but also wastes long-term potential of raw materials —  leading to significant and unnecessary ecological and economic waste.

When considering product development within the linear economic model, only incremental gains can be realized to reduce the impact of always needing to sell higher and higher quantities of products — again driven by the fact that brands can only realize value once:  when a product is sold. Instead of thinking about products through a linear sequence of steps, companies should consider the full lifecycle of a product and its material components.

Enter the circular economy — also known simply as circularity. In a circular economy, products are kept in use for as long as possible, with their material components reused to create new products at their end of life to realize maximum potential.

With circularity, brands no longer need to constantly push new products and can instead focus on providing the maximum value possible through existing products and resources. In return for providing long-term value, brands can provide a better customer experience and charge for it accordingly. And because the full potential of material inputs is realized, waste is minimized while revenue is maximized. Circularity is the answer to bringing customer satisfaction, business success and environmental sustainability into a symbiotic state.

Circular business strategies are increasingly becoming a competitive advantage for those looking to strengthen their position in the market over others offering traditional transactional product sales. The circular model better fits the way consumers prefer to purchase products and services: with smaller payments at the time value is provided over large up-front investments.

Value can be created a number of ways within the circular economy. Let’s take a look at a few.

Product Service Systems

By now we are all familiar with the service economy. Services like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit provide users with what they want without the need to invest in purchasing a physical product. Applying this model to a physical good gives you  a Product Service System, or PSS, where services are layered on top of product ownership adding a layer of value to the value chain.

Image Wikipedia

Product Service Systems can be broken down into three main categories:

Product Oriented

Products are sold to consumers with additional services offered to increase the value of the overall offering.

Use Oriented

Products are not sold directly; instead, the function of the product is provided through leasing or renting the product. With this business model, ownership of the products remain with the company providing them.

Results Oriented

In this business model, products only play a role in helping provide a service to the user. For example, a car is used to transport consumers using ride sharing apps, but the car is never owned by the customer.

These business models form the foundation for companies to not only replace revenue from traditional, one-time product sales, but actually increase revenue and customer satisfaction by driving repeat usage of the services offered.

With circularity becoming an obvious evolution of current linear business model, brands need a way to execute on the above business model shifts. In our next piece we will discuss the tactics to transform any business into a circular one.

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