2025 in review: the year AI became ordinary

The year began with a Chinese model that moved stock markets and ended with providers quietly routing people to smaller ones. In between, roughly every assumption held in January turned out to be temporary.

What actually changed in 2025

Model choice stopped being strategic. In January it looked like picking a provider was a long-term commitment; by December every major supplier offered hosted and downloadable options, and the gaps between them had narrowed to price and contract.

Prices fell, substantially and repeatedly. Capability moved from the frontier to the commodity tier within months rather than years.

Europe acquired real options: a fully open Swiss model in September, a European lab shipping open weights in December. « There is no European alternative » stopped being an accurate sentence.

And the regulatory story reversed. The deadline the whole of 2024 pointed at passed in August without consequence, and in November Brussels proposed to defer what was left.

What did not change

Everything that actually determines whether a company gets value. Staff do not use tools that are one click too far. Nobody owns the decision. The process was never written down. The person who built it left. The notes in the customer system stayed unread.

Not one of those problems was solved by a model release this year, and not one of them will be next year.

The year’s most useful sentence

Probably from 8 September: name the person who decides. Every other recommendation in fourteen months of writing assumed somebody was in a position to act, and in most Swiss SMEs nobody was.

Thank you, and see you in January

This blog will be quiet over the holidays; the next post arrives after Christmas. Whatever the industry does in 2026, roughly four announcements will matter to a company of thirty people, and this blog will try to tell you which four.

A good end to the year to all of you, and a proper break. The work will still be there on the sixth.