14.01.25 - Posted by Stephen Jenkins

2025 Industry Trends: The AI Perspective

8 min read

Last year saw staggering growth for AI in the workplace. No longer hidden deep within B2B tech products or services, but actually being used in an everyday fashion by the average office worker. Whether it’s email tools to sort through your inbox, video call AI to summarise notes, or generative AI tools like ChatGPT (which has astonishingly only just turned 2 years old) there’s an AI solution that covers it.

One of the most impressive tools we started experimenting with last September was Google’s NotebookLM. If you haven’t used it yet, it’s essentially a notebook-style assistant, able to answer questions on documents you upload, summarise documents, turn one document type (e.g. whitepaper) into another (e.g. briefing document) and many more.

So far, that doesn’t sound too dissimilar to Gemini, Co-Pilot, or other prominent GPTs. However, the functionality that captured our imagination – and that of many of our peers – was the ability for the platform to take your source material and turn it into an audio ‘podcast’ featuring two AI-generated co-hosts.

Having experimented last year by using txt file extracts of WhatsApp group conversations, this felt like a step-change in how generative AIs could create strong emotional resonance. I had a lot of fun sharing these podcast conversations with my golf group, my siblings, and my school friends and in each case the AI surfaced personal insights and reflections on conversations many of us had forgotten, in a very powerful – and often slightly unnerving – manner.

As a result of those experiments, NotebookLM became the Generative AI we became most interested in.

We plan to publish further thoughts on the platform throughout the year, including our experiments with the new Interactive Mode, which is currently in beta and allows the user to ‘have a conversation’ with the podcast hosts – essentially allowing a vocal prompt to interject and ask the hosts questions about what they’re discussing.

As it’s a new year and a period the PR world fondly considers ‘crystal ball guesswork’ or – perhaps, more professionally – ‘Predictions Season’, we thought it would make for an interesting experiment to see how an LLM could interrogate the wealth of trends reports in a manner that would be impossible by a human.

Having been a fan of the excellent curation work conducted by Amy Daroukakis, Ci En Lee, Gonzalo Gregori, and Iolanda Carvalho from the ‘Look Back/Look Forward’ project over the last four years, we knew this was an ideal foundational resource.

For anyone unaware of the above project, these four media and marketing professionals started in 2021 to collect every industry trends report they could get their hands on into an open source Google Drive. You can find the 2025 collection, containing well over 200 trends reports, here.

Until recently, this was a superb, but static, resource. Somewhere to dip into for category or company-specific insights into trends being forecast around brand marketing, creative, social, and much more. But anyone who has been in B2B marketing for any length of time will be aware that, whilst the vision may be genuine and heartfelt, it is all too easy for this future perspective to be shaped by the particular business model the author operates within.

This is where a generative AI tool such as NotebookLM could add a new layer of insight. It can ‘read’, synthesise and then make connections and associations a human might miss. As a result, it could tell us what to actually expect from the year ahead.

Unfortunately, the current source limit for NotebookLM is 50 PDF documents. As a result, we needed a human layer of curation and guidance, picking reports from the big tech/consultancy giants which we felt were most relevant for our B2B tech start-up and scale-up clients. You can review the ones we chose from Accenture, Dentsu, Forrester, Gartner and more within our custom Notebook in the link further below.

Having uploaded this source material, we were then able to interrogate them with different questions and challenges.

Our first question was quite simple: “Please summarise the common themes that emerge across all the 2025 trend reports.”

This is what it said:

The most common theme found across the 2025 trend reports is the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is expected to become increasingly integrated into everyday life. AI is predicted to play a pivotal role in everything from content creation and personalization to predictive analytics and campaign optimisation. Businesses are predicted to transition from viewing AI as a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have".The sources highlight the importance of responsible AI implementation, ethical considerations, and governance. The potential negative impacts of AI, such as job displacement, are also acknowledged. Another prominent theme is the changing media landscape, influenced by evolving consumer behaviour and the rise of digital platforms. This includes the growth of Connected TV (CTV) and the increasing importance of commerce media, which extends beyond retail. The sources also discuss the need for brands to adapt to a fragmented media environment, where consumers are engaging with content across multiple channels. Sustainability emerges as a crucial theme, particularly in the context of consumer expectations and brand differentiation. The reports emphasize the importance of integrating sustainability into products and services. They also highlight the need for collective action and incremental improvements to address environmental challenges. Other notable themes include: ● The importance of data and analytics: Businesses are encouraged to leverage data-driven strategies to understand consumer behaviour and optimize their marketing efforts. The importance of first-party data is also highlighted. ● The evolving nature of consumer behaviour: Trends such as the search for authenticity, a focus on personal well-being, and the desire for personalized experiences are predicted to shape consumer expectations. ● The rise of immersive technologies: Technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are expected to create new opportunities for brand engagement and content creation. These themes suggest that 2025 will be a year of significant transformation, driven by technological advancements, shifting consumer preferences, and the need for businesses to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

We then asked: “Having read all the reports, please synthesise their common themes and key trends, and then explain any interesting, surprising, or unusual insights that emerge.”

This provided a much longer answer, with common themes including AI Revolution, Shifting Consumer Landscape, Sustainability Imperative, Data-Driven Strategies, and Evolving Media Landscape. This included 36 source references to the reports, with some appearing multiple times, suggesting the AI was finding common threads across the entire source material.

What’s useful with NotebookLM is that it doesn’t just provide a stream of consciousness answer that other GPTs can do without guidance; it automatically formatted this response into sections, with headers, bullets and additional formatting to make the response easy to read and digest.

NotebookLM then pulled out five interesting and unusual insights from several of the resources, before concluding that “These insights suggest a future where businesses need to be more nuanced, adaptable, and human-centric in their approach.”

Our final question to the LLM was: “Are there any outliers or trends that appear in one report but not in any other? Please include the source and then explain why this is interesting. Comparing this insight to the other reports, do you think this is a valid and valuable lesson? Is it disputed by any of the other company reports?”

Again, this provided a lengthy answer where it pulled out the concept of “brainrot” from the Webby report and compared this to the conclusions from several of the other reports. What was most interesting here is it seemed to “understand” why a report from Webby may contradict reports from some of the other businesses by caveating its answer with – “It is important to note that the Webby report’s focus is on internet culture and trends, whereas reports like the YouTube report are more concerned with video content and advertising effectiveness. Therefore, the discrepancy in highlighted trends could be attributed to the different scopes of analysis.”

It is very easy with AI tools of this nature to go down a rabbit hole, ending up as fascinated by how it’s come up with the answer as much as the answer itself. For the tool to be a powerful work ally, this needs to be avoided. You’d hardly gaze in wonder at how an intelligent friend came up with an interesting insight after all.

From Too Many Dreams perspective, this is the year that AI has gone from just ‘tinkering’ to actual ‘tailoring’ for businesses using it, and NotebookLM has become the latest time-saving ally to help those in the tech and media world navigate dense topics with ease.

One of the other beauties of this technology is that, once the source Notebook is created, anyone can use it to interrogate the documents in a way that benefits them. As such, we’ve provided the link to our 2025 Trends Report Notebook below and would encourage you to have a play – you may just find something new that surprises you too.

Interrogate 2025 Media Trends with Too Many Dreams Notebook

And, if you’re a more auditory learner, then perhaps you’d like to listen to those two anonymous, autonomous hosts chat about what ‘they’ felt was revealing from the source material. You can listen to that here.

 

 

14.01.25 - Posted by Stephen Jenkins
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