2025: The year AI came of age – and the questions ahead for 2026

AS 2025 draws to a close, artificial intelligence (AI) has unmistakably transitioned from experimental technology to essential infrastructure.

This was the year AI moved from boardroom curiosity to balance sheet necessity, reshaping how we work, create and compete on the global stage. The numbers tell a compelling story – 44 per cent of US businesses now pay for AI tools, up dramatically from just 5 per cent in 2023, while average AI contracts reached US$530,000, according to Air Street Capital and AI investor Nathan Benaich’s State of AI Report 2025. More striking still: AI-first startups grew 1.5 times faster than their peers. These aren’t pilot projects anymore – they’re core operations.

The technical achievements were equally remarkable. AI system performance surged across major benchmarks, with scores rising by 18.8, 48.9 and 67.3 percentage points on MMMU (designed to evaluate multimodal models), Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A (GPQA) and SWE-bench (for evaluating large language models on real world software issues collected from GitHub), respectively, in just one year.