2025 Tech Trends: How to Thrive in the Big Shift

7 Forces CEOs and CMOs Must Manage to Maximize Growth

This week, I was the B2B Correspondent on the podcast CMO Confidential, sharing my predictions, warnings, and pep talks for 2025. You can watch the show on YouTube or listen to the podcast on Apple.

The show is hosted by the illustrious Mike Linton, the former CMO of Ancestry, BestBuy, Farmer’s Insurance, and eBay. Highlights of my predictions are below, and some of the best predictions I read to prepare are below that. What did I miss or get wrong?

1) In 2025, the Economy will be Friendlier to Tech
2) AI Goes from Experimentation to Full-Scale Production
3) Goals are Accelerating Without Equivalent Budget
4) The AI Headwind in Search is HUGE
5) Leaders Must Rise as Social Influencers
6) The Decade of Video Has Begun
7) Everything Old is New Again - Build Your Own Newsletter Following

Listen to my episode here

2025 Predictions

1) In 2025, the Economy will be Friendlier to Tech

It has been ROUGH the last few years in tech. Increased interest rates slowed investment, tighter regulatory bodies scuttled acquisitions, buyers’ budgets were cut and remained tight, and thus, many companies laid off many employees to stay efficient. The economic downturn felt like a real recession in tech (outside of AI and Security).

But 2025 is coming in like a breath of fresh air. A top investor told me in December:

"Software buying is warming up again. We're expecting next year to be much more positive for all software companies, not just AI and security."

Tomasz Tunguz just published a blog on the massive amounts of cash ready for acquisition this year, and the new US political leadership and its changes at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) could vastly change the regulatory environment to allow for many more mergers and acquisitions. Any exit for an investor puts more money into new investments, and M&A allows bigger companies to combine forces with innovative, younger companies. It stimulates investment and growth for all of us.

At the same time, the positive market dynamics could open up the IPO market again. There’s an element of “wildcard” here, with companies like Databricks able to do massive off-market fundraising (In December, they raised one of the largest private fundraising rounds ever, delaying their need for an IPO.) But the stock market has been more and more positive on tech stocks recently, so successful IPOs could be back on the docket.

2) AI Goes from Experimentation to Full-Scale Production

A huge part of the economic positivity around tech is due to AI, no surprise to anyone with eyes and ears. Within the world of B2B tech, all conversations revolve around AI. Most tech execs are focused on both how they can better incorporate AI into their own products and how they can get leapfrog efficiency by using AI in their teams.

For our own products, we're in the race to relevancy. Is it possible in the next 12 months to separate from the pack and establish enduring leadership? It’s a noisy market with everyone claiming AI innovation. It’s a shakeup, it’s a race, the pressure is on! AI vendors are taking budgets from SaaS products and from headcount budgets by replacing people. Established companies are trying to reestablish themselves as credible and innovative AI leaders. Grammarly, for instance, has a huge loving user base (me included) but is trying to let everyone know they're a fantastic AI product too. Zapier is one of the leading integration vendors, but can they become THE integration platform for AI? These are the top conversations inside companies. No one wants to become the dated dinosaur:

If you love funny and insightful memes, you should follow Elena Verna Here

In our own teams, while 2024 was the year of AI experimentation, 2025 is a year of production-level projects. Many CMOs, in particular, have expanded beyond content production using AI in operations for core data and processes. One company is replacing their ZoomInfo investment with their own AI data scraper of public information. One company is replacing their translation vendor with a translation GPT they created easily. The Sales Development reps space (junior inside sales reps) is seeing a huge change, with most companies using AI alongside existing reps instead of hiring more reps. One CMO I know tripled their meetings booked with Qualified’s AI SDR and no incremental reps. The future is here. OpenAI reported earlier this year that marketers had adopted AI faster than other teams and detailed out the top categories - I covered their research in my blog here.

3) Goals are Accelerating Without Equivalent Budget

And though the overall economic market is showing signs of positivity, most companies are still a bit tight on budget - too much to match growth goals with equivalent budget increases. Marketers are being asked to “do more with less” again. Outside of the high-flying AI companies, efficiency is still a big part of the game. One critical skill this year is team upgrading - CMOs can’t just hire more people; they need to replace and upgrade when goals are big and budgets are smaller.

4) The AI Headwind in Search is HUGE

There is a massive transition happening this year - for the last decade or more, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been THE major engine of tech growth and an incredibly efficient lever. People would search on Google, companies could rank high organically with amazing content they had curated, and qualified buyers would directly enter sales funnels. The change in user behavior, where AI answers questions directly instead of directing people to helpful company website pages, is massively disruptive. Already, many B2B marketers are seeing a 15-20% decrease in organic traffic as AI answers replace link traffic from SEO and AI vendors take traffic from Google. Not only is this decrease an issue of inbound volume, the implications are even bigger. Organic search traffic was also the highest converting source of traffic — double other channels and triple or quadruple many paid channels. This is a massive headwind for growth and begs a lot of questions about what comes next in earning back those eyeballs, awareness, and interest.

5) The Rise of Leaders as Social Influencers

Social media is one initial answer many give to the issue of organic traffic declines. CEOs gaining massive LinkedIn and X followings have become a palpable difference in the awareness of certain companies over competitors. It’s become clear that people don’t engage as much with brands on social media as they do with individuals. Personal pages get 3-5x the impressions and engagement of brands.

Building CEO and executive profiles is a huge awareness lever. Look at the top AI frontier models - Anthropic wants to catch Open AI. But Sam Altman has 3.2 M of his own X followers. His own distribution channel. Anthropic executives don't have 1 million followers across all platforms, all executives combined. Can their marketing team pay enough in billboards and banner ads to overcome that free distribution channel? No way.

(If you need help building out your Executives’ LinkedIn profiles, check out Samantha McKenna, CEO of SamSales. I follow her work and tips closely and know several companies where she’s the force behind execs for who social doesn't come naturally)

6) The Decade of Video Has Begun

The young’ns on TikTok have shown us that video doesn’t have to be formally produced and perfect to be crazy viral. YouTube has the largest search network in the world after Google! Facebook Reels get massive virality. Even LinkedIn launched video shorts in 2024. Video’s prominence is huge and growing. Yet I still see many companies with a small video library, demo videos that are way too long and boring, a YouTube channel that looks dated, and a total lack of game on short-form video. Companies have to have a stronger video play across platforms in the coming years, and technology like AI, AI editing, and subtitles are catching up to make that easier to achieve. Video has to be ENTERTAINING, not just informative. There is also huge potential to maximize user-generated video by customers, employees, or other people in your ecosystem.

It’s not the native language for some of us, but its video is the language of what’s coming next. We’ve got to invest here, especially when the bottom is falling out on our cash-cow SEO.

7) Everything Old is New Again - Build Your Own Newsletter Following

Last week, I was at a CMO event where we went through the massive damage that SEO changes are going to cause to our businesses. One of the top answers to the problem? “Build your own distribution channel.” I sent a 🤣 emoji to my CMO friend on the call. “I think they just told us to build a newsletter list.”

It’s great to have followers on social and video channels, but at the end of the day, they own your distribution channel, you don’t. LinkedIn and Facebook have both changed algorithms over time such that your OWN FOLLOWERS don’t see your posts - you have to pay extra for that. TikTok could be banned. Continuing to drive people back to your own website and programs to collect emails for follow-up remains the quintessential marketing gold. I’m against the rampant “gating” of content - requiring an email for every download. But if you offer real value on an ongoing basis, people will share their contact info for that value. (Please subscribe to my blog : )

What Else to Read

In preparing for the podcast, I read some of my own favorite predictors’ blogs. You might enjoy them as well:

• Tom Tunguz’s 2025 Predictions - A VC’s Perspective of the Market

• Jon Miller’s 2025 Predictions - From the Marketer who founded Marketo and recently founded an AI-Native Marketing company of the future

What did I miss or get wrong?

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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