Guest Spot

AI Appreciation Day: Business Leaders unveil emerging trends

AI Appreciation Day: Business Leaders unveil emerging trends

AI Appreciation Day trends feature expert insights on AI transformation, GenAI, governance, and how brands are scaling intelligent innovation in 2025.

We speak to key experts from business, sales, technology, innovation, marketing, data and AI about some of the emerging trends, challenges and opportunities AI opens, and what the future holds for businesses that are now facing pressure to adapt to survive.

AI utilisation across brands: opportunity to unlock more potential

Generative AI is dominating discourse across business operations. Tools like ChatGPT, now generating over one billion searches daily, are rapidly becoming part of consumers’ and professionals’ everyday lives and have created the biggest upheaval in search and experience delivery that we have seen in decades.

Brands are moving quickly to adapt. In the US, Amazon’s AI tool Rufus is transforming how

consumers discover and shop for products.

A recent Digital, Marketing & eComm in Focus 2025 report, produced by digital, data and eCommerce advisory & consultancy Arktic Fox in collaboration with recruitment firm Six Degrees Executive, reflect this groundswell of AI utilisation intent and adoption, with data suggesting solid experimentation and some brands starting to scale AI use cases.

The report reveals that 59% of brands are experimenting with or scaling efforts around generative AI and AI more broadly to drive personalisation efforts. Half of brands are experimenting with GenAI for content generation, and almost a quarter (24%) are scaling up efforts here. Nearly half (49%) of brands are experimenting with using AI for insights generation, with 19% scaling up.  

The opportunity for growth in the AI space remains considerable. Currently, more advanced levels of AI adoption are typically confined to larger companies. Just 13% of leaders believe their organisation is advanced in leveraging predictive analytics, with these mostly being brands with revenues in excess of $100 million.   

“But while adoption is growing, most brands still face barriers to unlocking AI’s full potential,” says Teresa Sperti, Founder and Director at Arktic Fox. “Only 14% have a mature, unified customer view, despite it being a key investment area. Without strong data foundations, efforts to use AI for personalisation and experience delivery will fall short.

“Based on what we are observing in market, AI utilisation is still being driven by efficiency based plays and whilst some brands are scaling their efforts more sophisticated use of AI | genAI for experience delivery is still an opportunity for most.”

Helping business leaders step off the ‘technical treadmill’ with AI assistants

According toSangeeta Mudnal, Chief Technology Officer of pioneering GenAI platform Glu, AI-powered assistants from Google, Meta, and Perplexity are redefining how consumers engage with brands, creating an entirely new canvas for creative expression. These developments aren’t merely technical innovations but rather a fundamental reimagining of the creative producer’s role.

In fact, Microsoft reports that its AI assistant Copilot has accelerated consumer purchase journeys by approximately 30%, while partnerships like OpenAI and Shopify’s integration of purchasing within ChatGPT conversations hint at commerce experiences embedded directly in conversational flows.

“As AI assistants increasingly mediate the relationship between brands and consumers, we’re witnessing a profound shift in how creative work is conceptualised, produced, optimised, and delivered,” Mudnal says. With the rapid rise of these industry trends platforms like Glu.ai are now showcasing a deep commitment to customer-centric innovation, while being dedicated to helping e-commerce merchants seamlessly adapt and thrive in this new era of AI-facilitated ecommerce.

As an example, Glu,ai’s AI-powered platforms helps organise digital assets with automatic tagging, generate tailored content suggestions, and automates time-consuming tasks like bulk cropping and resizing, creating the operational efficiency you need to experiment with emerging AI channels.

“Starting with a solution like Glu.au means building the creative muscles and operational frameworks quickly and at scale. While other creative producers are still struggling with platform-specific formatting and technical SEO optimisation, you’ll be crafting distinctive brand voices that flourish in conversation,” Mudnal explains.

Managing AI transformation and governance in asset-centric industries

AI presents significant opportunities for many organisations, but asset-centric industries in particular, where management and data collection plays a key role in the viability of assets, resources and infrastructure, are emerging as clear candidates for AI transformation.

However, according to Anthony Cipolla, AI Lead with data-led asset management solutions firm COSOL, organisations across the asset-centric industry landscape exhibit mixed maturity when it comes to their AI journeys, and are looking for guidance on getting AI integrations right.

During a recent industry event, Cipolla discussed the concept of approaching AI transformation from a Walk, Jog, Run Framework, where organisations are encouraged to gradually build their AI capabilities sensibly and safely.

Whether companies are exploring computer vision, language models, prediction or enhanced insights retrieval from structured and unstructured data, this framework sees AI practices first needing to become trustworthy and repeatable, then later able to deliver real value, before late-stage scaling up into production across the business.

“The scale of the change that AI presents to all industries is perhaps comparable to the disruption brought by the internet, mobile technology and cloud computing (though likely more exponential in nature),” Cipolla explained. “At the same time, the concept of the Agentic-Web is being developed to determine how AI systems are standardised and communicate with each other.

“AI Governance has also become a priority for organisations, though the good news is that it builds on the existing Data Governance work many companies have already undertaken.

“Business transformation takes time, communication and understanding across organisations and industries. For asset-centric industries looking to walk then jog then run with AI, this means effective change management must also be one of the most important areas of focus.”

This pace of transformation is evident across related sectors, and this is highlighted by just how quickly AI is changing the software engineering space.

 “During a conversation at Meta’s LlamaCon event in April 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that within a year, approximately half of Meta’s software development could be handled by AI, with expectations for this proportion to grow over time,” Cipolla explains.

Integrating AI capabilities directly into existing business systems

Looking to harness the benefits of AI to provide its customers with more features, one company has taken steps to build AI features conveniently into its product, providing users with hassle-free access to frontier technology.

Leading enterprise resource planning and analytics software provider, Pronto Software, just signed a strategic agreement with IBM Australia, enabling the integration of powerful Agentic AI capabilities into its Pronto Xi ERP platform via IBM Watsonx.

Pronto Software Managing Director Chad Gates says the initiative is designed to democratise access to intelligence, helping businesses develop the capabilities of their teams.

“Rather than replacing workers, we’re using AI to elevate them,” Gates says. “Our customers, many of them family-run, mid-sized businesses, can enable staff to act strategically.  Pronto Software can work with customers to build and deploy Agentic AI that not only informs, but acts on the information, unlocking real business value without compromising security.

“With Watson’s Agentic AI integrated into Pronto Xi, workers can ask a question in plain English and instantly receive forward-looking insights that support smarter decisions.”

This approach shows how businesses can adopt AI without disrupting existing workflows. Rather than requiring staff to learn entirely new platforms, the technology becomes part of the tools they already use daily, reducing the typical barriers to AI adoption.

“AI doesn’t have to be overwhelming or intimidating,” Gates adds. “It should feel like a natural part of your workflow, and that’s exactly what we are delivering. With this new capability, Pronto Xi becomes not just a system of record, but a system of insight and empowerment.”

The future belongs to those who blend human design thinking and AI power

AI will never ‘replace’ authentic human connection – but it can drive efficiency and amplify the impact of our business interactions and operations. AI’s core power lies in its ability to automate the grunt work – those repetitive, manual tasks that slow down productivity. From automating lead generation to scaling personalised customer outreach and enabling more strategic conversations, AI-powered tools are proving to be an asset rather than a threat.

According to Rory Clark, founder of NeuralNet Chat, now is the time to pay attention to the demand in AI automation while we still are in AI’s infancy. Clark likens today’s AI moment to the early 2000s tech boom, when companies like Amazon and Facebook were just starting to take off.

“We’re at that dot-com moment again,” Clark says. “There are so many AI opportunities emerging daily, and businesses that act now will gain a huge competitive edge.”

But that doesn’t mean chasing every trend. Clark warns against‘AI washing’, and getting distracted by tools being labelled as ‘AI-powered,’ when there’s barely any real AI behind them.

“The future belongs to businesses that combine smart automation with authentic engagement, marketing savvy, and a strong understanding of their customer journey,” Clark concludes.  “The companies that adopt AI now won’t look back. They’ll be glad they jumped in early.”

Discover the latest trends and insights—explore the Business Insights Journal for up-to-date strategies and industry breakthroughs!

Related posts

Prime Day Playbook: Avoiding Attribution Traps and Driving Real Growth

BI Journal

Buying a Home With Friends? Treat It Like a Business

Kelli A. Fogarty

The Invisible Engine: How Payment Orchestration Powers the Future of Commerce

Eyad Musharbash