Prompted: Our AI Holiday Wishlist for 2025

In our latest monthly trend report, we covered how generative AI dominated the media in 2024 — even more than in 2023 and 2022 combined. Moving beyond the initial shock and awe at AI’s capabilities, this year’s discussions focused on adoption and the practical implementation of the technology across all industries. It was also a banner year for major AI advancements and announcements from AI creators. 

AI Wrapped 

The media certainly had a lot to cover in the world of AI this year. In 2024, we saw:

• The launch of OpenAI’s Sora video generator, which in turn launched a year’s worth of discussion about if, how, and when brands should use AI-generated video content (remember the Toys “R” Us ad?)
• Google’s roll out of AI Overviews, followed recently by OpenAI’s creation of its own search product. This transformation of the SEO world is already affecting brands’ search traffic. (On our radars for 2025? An AI search tool built by Reddit, so you don’t have to keep adding “reddit” to your Google searches to get the real answers.)
• Brands taking AI innovation in-house and training their own smaller language models on proprietary data. While 2023 was all about building bigger and better, 2024 saw a more strategic — and cost-effective — approach to AI from enterprises.
• The release of AI agents from every major tech provider. AI agents promise to take everything we know about AI one step further, setting AI free to complete human-level tasks autonomously. The tech is still in its early stage, so we expect this one to be a top topic for 2025, as well. 

Our AI Wish List

Even with all the progress we’ve seen, there’s always room for more innovation. As we look ahead to 2025, here’s what we’re still hoping for:

AI That Turns "This Meeting Could Have Been an Email" Into Reality

AI tools like Otter can act as our meeting companions, automating meeting minutes and summarizing action items. But we’re dreaming of an AI that can answer an even more important question when it comes to meetings — did we really need to meet in the first place? Our dream AI tool can assess a meeting agenda and determine when a check-in is necessary, and when a good, bulleted-pointed email with clear action steps will suffice and give everyone that 30 minutes back on their calendars.

AI That Predicts the Next Social Trend

Sure, social media analytics platforms like Hootsuite might be able to tell us what’s currently trending on social media so we know when it’s time to caption something as demure or when to tag it as brat. But when we create our content calendars, we’d love to be ahead of the curve. An AI that not only analyzes current trends but tells us what’s coming up in the future would ensure we’re both strategic in our social concepts and always on trend.

AI That Acts as a Branding Watchdog

Stop! Is that shade of pink in the background of your social graphic one of your brand colors? Did the brand guidelines say you should be mixing fonts like that in your ebook? Our design team humbly requests an AI that sends a big, glaring warning any time someone attempts to use an off-brand graphic or stray from approved design standards. This AI would act as a brand protector — brand awareness and trust start with a strong, recognizable brand — not with a flashing cat GIF. 

AI That Subscribes Us to Every New Reporter Substack

This year, we saw reporters move from traditional news publications to the world of independent journalism in droves. Across industries, audiences are increasingly turning to alternative media — whether it's niche blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, independent creators, or industry-specific newsletters. In 2025, it would be helpful to have an AI that can keep up with today’s rapidly transforming earned media landscape and track down errant reporters, automatically signing us up each time another journalist launches their own Substack (or Beehiiv) newsletter. That way, we’d know exactly where to find the right writers to help tell our stories.

See You Next Year

These AI tools might be more wishful thinking than the next big thing from OpenAI. But even if we aren’t getting these exact innovations next year, there’s still so much potential for AI to evolve and make our lives and work even more efficient and creative.

Stay up to date with the latest in AI with Prompted, our biweekly blog series bringing you relevant updates and insights on how to strategically add AI-driven solutions into your marketing toolkit.