Stargate, Deep Seek and the Futility of Making Predictions about AI in 2025 with @jacsrice, CEO @tribe.ai

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Making any kind of time bounded predictions about where AI will be in the year of our lord 2025 is a fools errand. But, we’re suckers for this stuff, so we asked Jackie from Tribe to revise the State of AI download we did last year and orient it to what she sees coming for AI in the enterprise in the new year.

No sooner did we record the conversation than OpenAI announced Stargate, Operator, and Deep Seek shot to the top of the App Store. And made the whole conversation form the week before feel dated.

But dated is different than timeless and I think what Jackie does an incredible job doing is anchoring founders and executives on the timeless principles of leveraging AI to deliver ROI and unlock entirely new experiences.

For this conversation, the key takeaway is that AI implementation is moving from theoretical to practical, with clear winners emerging based on their ability to drive real business value rather than just run experiments.

-The AI vendor landscape is shifting from a winner-take-all market to a more competitive space, with Anthropic emerging as a serious challenger to OpenAI. Companies are increasingly comfortable switching between different AI models based on specific needs and cost considerations.

-Three areas showed clear product-market fit in 2024:
Enterprise ChatGPT implementations
Customer support automation
Code generation tools (with Google reportedly generating 50% of their code using AI tools)

- Many companies are stuck in “POC Purgatory” - running small AI proof-of-concepts that never scale to production. The successful companies are those making real commitments and showing patience through initial iterations.

-The biggest barriers to AI adoption aren’t technical - they’re cultural and organizational. Senior engineers and executives often resist AI tools while junior staff embrace them. Success requires leadership commitment and openness to changing how work gets done.

- Private equity firms are emerging as surprising AI innovators, focusing on implementing AI in their portfolio companies to drive value. This is shifting PE’s reputation from financial engineering to technological transformation.

- “Agents” are becoming the dominant theme for 2025, with companies seeking to automate entire workflows rather than just individual tasks. There’s growing demand for “factories of agents” that can scale automation across organizations.

- The traditional lines between software and services companies are blurring. Service-heavy companies like Palantir are being valued more like software companies as they demonstrate scalable AI implementation approaches.

- Marketing automation is emerging as the next major AI opportunity, with companies seeking to both reduce costs and improve ROI through automated content creation and campaign optimization.

- Companies that don’t move beyond experimentation risk falling permanently behind, as AI is compressing innovation cycles and creating growing gaps between leaders and laggards.

This was a wild ride of a conversation with someone who’s in the trenches with a wide range of enterprise customers. Her perspective and insights are invaluable. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.

And if you are looking to get started with or level up AI within your company, don’t hesitate to reach out directly to Jackie at [email protected]. 600+ of the best AI engineers on the planet are standing by.

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