Stanford’s 2025 AI Index Report
Stanford published its annual report. It’s pretty important, because it separates speculation from pure numbers. Along with some obvious things (AI is getting better, cheaper, widespread, duh), there are some very interesting facts:
While almost every organization is using AI now (78% in 2024, although no doubt, for most of them it boils down to using chatbots to compose emails), the actual results are somewhat modest. The productivity increase is on the scale of 10% (to be honest, such an increase in one year is kinda unprecedented), but the increase in revenue for most industries is just about 5%. Why? Because as with any general purpose technology, realization of full benefit would require complete rebuilding the organizational structures and processes. The problem is that no one knows how these new processes would look like, and we will have to learn from our own mistakes.
Maybe old news, but AI provides more leverage to less experienced employees. The great equalizer of modern times. Again, that means that we need to reformulate our approach to team staffing. I would only add that it can help only if you have some remote understanding of what you’re doing, so those who apply for entry positions, do your homework well.
The number of AI-related incidents continues to rise. We see a twofold increase in 2024 vs 2023, and this is before frantic adoption of Agents and MCPs we see in 2025. So, we need to brace ourselves and be ready for more and more data leaks and integrity breaches.
The report contains a lot more nuggets, but it’s almost 500 pages long, so I would really recommend to use AI to extract what you fancy.