It’s the start of a new year, so lets make some general comments and predictions for this new year. None of these are in any order and mostly based on topics I’ve been following, not things that’ll hit the top news cycle.

Lets begin.

Cars

I think car companies will struggle this year. They haven’t really hit their stride since the bumpy ride during and after COVID, including soft sales during COVID, record profitability during the supply shortage and union strikes demanding more pay after that. Looking at a few car manufacturing companies, VW, Stellantis, and GM are experiencing several uphill battles, including recalls, high prices, and a challenging sales market with EV’s. Add in the pressure from a very successful Chinese EV market and these companies will have to thread the needle to maintain their market dominance.

While many countries have put tariffs on car imports from Chinese manufacturers, these measures will not stop the flood of those cars making their way to traditionally less profitable markets for the major car manufacturers and will just slow the inevitable. Unless the established manufacturers use this time to bolster their grip and regain their stride.

Economy

It’s a big area, so lets talk about US macroeconomics. I think the US economy will remain relatively strong, as long as the undercurrents taxing the strength of the current wave doesn’t cause the economy to falter prematurely during its recovery.

What do I mean by that? So we managed to beat the potential recession (in the traditional measurements of recessionary indicators), with a balance of monetary policy and luck. But the economy is still a bit… squiffy? The economy seem to be up and down and up again. For example, jobs, while the numbers look good (around 4.2%), there’s a complete upheaval with AI “taking” jobs that are traditionally higher paid, middle management or entry-level white collar jobs. Since there is no cap to “profitability” companies will try to extract as much value as possible from this innovation, at the risk of eating their own tail if it gets them that extra penny.

On the plus side, there is huge investment in AI, healthcare and other innovative technologies, so the hope is that those investments will offset the potential for recession, as long as these businesses don’t pull out the second these innovations start to falter.

The economy is sitting on a house of cards in my opinion, and a quick look at the landscape is pretty split; with the recessionary outlook ranging from 15-45%, I’m erring on a more positive outlook, with the innovations in AI and healthcare bolstering economic growth, but we will see what it ends out looking like.

Cybersecurity

This is close to my current trajectory, so one reason why I’m sharing it. The industry has traditionally suffered from a shortage of laborers (although I think its due to gatekeepers rather than laborers wanting to join the industry), so shoring up this shortage with continued improvement in predictive and generative AI will be a huge benefit for this industry.

Cybersecurity business units are typically seen as a cost centers, and some businesses treat them more like insurance — only well-funded well when something bad happens. The only downside is that recent studies show the impact on business income is limited, so businesses see little benefit in investing in cybersecurity. Take, for example, the layoffs impacting Yahoo’s “The Paranoids” that was a big hit to some of the OG cyber experts.

I think the cybersecurity industry will continue to greatly benefit from the AI boom in 2025. If regulatory agencies won’t make companies feel the true impact of a breach on customers and businesses then I’m hoping that AI tools can reduce that cost. If all we achieve in 2025 is maximizing the effectiveness of every dollar spent on cybersecurity to better secure customers data, that would be a win.

AI

Growth in this new space will continue to be bonkers, but I believe it will start slowing down this year as legislation, profitability and business effectiveness will start weighing on its growth streak.

Lets break this down:

Legislation

Now that it’s been about 2 years, legislation is starting to catch up, with the AI Act in the EU, the executive order Biden signed in 2023, several states, including California, Tennessee and Utah creating bills around AI and its use, I imagine this will be the beginning, not the end of legislative discussions. So far, it really hasn’t slowed down the growth and implementation but I imagine that will start happening in 2025.

Profitability

Lets, just focus on OpenAI, as they are the biggest movers and shakers in the space and because they are a new entity in this space.

OpenAI is losing money hand over fist, to the tune of $5 billion in 2024. They are also restructuring their business to better take advantage of the money they are leaving on the table. I imagine that in 2025, the price of OpenAI and ChatGPT will cause people to question if absolutely everything needs generative AI or if these businesses can improve the integration to make generative AI worth the additional cost.

Building nuclear reactors to power the growth in AI doesn’t come cheap, and I imagine this cost will be passed on sooner or later.

Business Effectiveness

Its a weird couple of years when so many products join the AI hype train. I think I saw AI powered thermal grease at one point? Cool. AI’ify my coffee please! It must taste better with AI.

Businesses have been adding generative AI as an additional cost to customers (IE Notion’s AI cost $10/mo), rather than just adding the feature in for only higher tier product offering like most companies did in the past. This pricing model as an add-on, while not new, is definitely is more widespread than I’ve seen before. As potential downstream costs increases and profitability becomes a goal of many AI providers, this year will be pivotal and will squeeze businesses that used AI to generate “free” income, will either no longer offer AI screw drivers, or be forced to rapidly increase investment in what was a relatively simple and easy cash grab with a quick integration with OpenAI APIs. This year is where the rubber will meet the road for businesses offering AI as an added cost. No, customers will not be satisfied with paying $10/mo for a marginally accurately generated meeting summary that they still need to copy and paste into other services.

New Innovations in AI

Some new innovations that may keep this space moving is agentic AI and the personal AI supercomputer from NVIDIA, which may continue to supercharge AI growth in a way not yet seen, allowing businesses to continue to solve difficult problems while decreasing their cost rapidly.

Quantum

OK, here’s something for Futures Enigma. Quantum is a little bit like generative AI, but not productized yet.

This space made huge leaps last year, with Google’s Willow Chip, supposedly solving a problem that traditional compute would have taken 10 septillion years to solve. While this result has drawn some skepticism, I imagine that this is a huge PR win for this field nonetheless.

Lets just tack the AI wave to this quantum problem and I’m guessing that 2025 will continue to push this field further than it has in the past. I don’t think it will be productized or mass produced any time soon, but the world will need to take note and prepare for what will likely be a bumpy few years for security, encryption and the availability for raw compute even if we get a quarter of what is promised by this innovation, especially since last year saw a doubling of funding in this field to $1.5 billion.

BONUS: Space

This is something I’m super excited about. The Final Frontier.

It will be a curious push to space in 2025, with SpaceX, NASA, ESA, CNSA, and other agencies and companies setting the foundation for future space endeavors throughout this year.

I’m particularly excited about landing on the moon with the Artemis program. Its a bummer Artemis 2 has been delayed to sometime in 2026, but with the massive influx in orbital launches (more than doubling since 2020) makes me think the investment in this area hasn’t yet seen the fever pitch. What’s crazy is SpaceX conducted 138 of those, thats more than 2 per week!

I’m a bit sad the ISS will begin its controlled decent by next year with estimated decommissioning by 2030. It’s also sad nothing from the Western industrialized nations is ready to take its place, but I think with the growth of investment into commercial space exploration, it won’t be long before something will be ready, likely before the full decommissioning of ISS.

You Ready?

There it is! That’s my list for 2025, I’m sure there will be more crazy stuff that happens in 2025, and I’ll be ready for it. Seeing these improvements this last year makes me excited for technology, even if it is currently bogged down by questionable business practices. The march of technology and innovation is something I’ll always be excited about.