Key AI Business Trends for 2025

 

Google’s AI Business Trends 2025 report highlights how AI is shaping up to impact various industries in the coming year. It's packed with insights to help businesses like yours get a handle on what's coming.

One of the big themes is multimodal AI, which is about AI getting much better at understanding the world around us by taking in different types of information – like images, videos, and audio, not just text. This added layer of context means AI can be more precise and, well, more human-like in its understanding. For instance, in financial services, we might see AI analysing market commentary videos, considering tone of voice and even facial expressions to get a more nuanced understanding of sentiment. This trend is on a rapid growth trajectory, with the global multimodal AI market projected to reach a massive $98.9 billion by 2037.

Then there's the evolution of AI agents. Forget simple chatbots – the report talks about AI agents developing into sophisticated multi-agent systems capable of handling complex workflows. These AI applications are moving beyond basic Q&A to actually reason, plan, and adapt, much like humans do, to manage complex business processes.

82% of large enterprises plan to integrate AI agents within the next 3 years, and 71% believe these agents will significantly increase workflow automation and improve customer service satisfaction.

We're already seeing examples of this, with companies using AI agents to boost employee confidence in communications and streamline content management.

The way we search for information is also set to change with assistive AI. The report highlights this as the next frontier for knowledge discovery. Instead of just typing keywords, we'll be using more intuitive, AI-powered search tools that can understand complex queries and even interpret different media like images and audio. This shift is about moving from simply retrieving information to actually creating knowledge. Advanced enterprise search tools powered by AI promise faster access to data, more intuitive searches, and deeper, AI-powered insights. The predicted size of the enterprise search market by 2031 is a whopping $12.9 billion, showing the scale of this transformation.

Creating effortless customer experiences with AI is another key trend. The goal is to make customer interactions so seamless that the technology feels almost invisible. Customer service and support are a top priority for new AI initiatives, with 55% of organisations rating it as important in the next 12 months. AI is helping to solve common customer experience challenges by improving customer support, understanding customer sentiment, and enabling greater personalisation. We're seeing this across industries, from travel planning to food technology, with AI-powered tools providing faster, more relevant, and more efficient customer interactions.

Finally, the report emphasises strengthening security with advanced AI. As AI becomes more integrated into our businesses, so does the need for robust security, and AI itself is playing a crucial role here. In fact, 2025 is predicted to be a revolutionary year for AI adoption into security and privacy practices. AI has the potential to be a powerful tool in every security professional's toolkit, helping to bolster security defences, identify and combat threats, and speed up responses. It’s being used for things like rule creation, attack simulation, and compliance violation detection. Companies are already leveraging Google Cloud AI to support the identification of security threats and see value from high security standards. It's estimated that organisations applying security AI and automation see an average reduction of $2.2 million in breach costs.