What a year 2025 has been! As we look back, it’s clear that we collectively navigated a fascinating, and sometimes chaotic, period defined by massive, intertwined forces: the relentless, accelerating surge of artificial intelligence (AI), the critical, institutional necessity for proper governance and control, and the challenges of burgeoning budget demands. Our research this year wasn’t just about spotting trends; it was about translating the hype into solid, actionable next steps for you, our clients, precisely when you needed them most.
The Themes That Defined Our Conversations
You, our clients, constantly challenged us with your real-world project questions, and three mega-trends consistently shaped our discussions and research agenda: AI, governance, and keeping control of costs.
The Cost Conundrum and Value Maximisation
The pressure to manage budgets and prove value was relentless, dominating many of our inquiry calls. The biggest wake-up call of the year was undoubtedly Microsoft’s move. We quickly responded with a detailed analysis, ‘Navigating the 2025 Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Reset, September 2025. This special report was a hard reality check, detailing an unavoidable 6–12% budget impost for mid-to-large organisations.
But we didn’t stop there. Knowing you need to offset these costs, we delivered strategic guidance on maximising value: ‘The Hybrid Cloud Paradox: Unmasking the True Cost of Ownership’, November 2025, helped expose those hidden expenses, and ‘Strategic Value Realisation: Artificial Intelligence Costs Management and Value Attribution’, November 2025, offered a framework for getting your AI investments right. We are completely focused on helping you see the full picture when it comes to your bottom line.
The AI Transformation (from Vague Promises to Specifics)
AI didn’t just dominate; it matured. We saw our advice evolve from the foundational necessity of planting an investment stake with ‘A Strategic Value Framework for Digital Transformation’, April 2025, to deep-seated technical discussions about implementation. You told us you needed to move past simple GenAI chatbots. So, we dove into the next phase:
- We examined the technical limits of GenAI reasoning in ‘Understanding ‘Reasoning’ in Generative AI: A Misaligned Analogy to Human Thought’, May 2025.
- We positioned emerging graph technology as the key to enhancing search quality with ‘Graph Databases and AI: The Catalyst for Contextual Intelligence in the Enterprise’, March 2025, and improving RAG reasoning in ‘From Text Piles to Knowledge Structures: Using Graphs to Improve RAG Reasoning’, September 2025.
- And we predicted the strategic endgame: ‘invisible AI’ being embedded directly into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in ‘Your Core Business Solutions Are Becoming AI–Centric… What’s the Impact on Your ICT Strategy?’, November 2025.
The Governance Imperative
All this technical depth and cost pressure forced a major pivot to governance and risk. You shared your concerns about executive and board liability, and we responded directly. Our special report, ‘Agentic AI and Leadership’s Duty of Care: The Case for Excellence in AI Governance’, October 2025, laid out the non-negotiable reality of personal liability.
We followed that up with practical templates to establish order: ‘An AI Responsible Use Policy is the Cornerstone of Effective AI Governance’, June 2025, and the foundational oversight guide, ‘Six Questions for Boards and Six Questions for Executives to Ask Regarding AI’, October 2025. AI is relentlessly forcing us to formalise risk management at every layer.
Compelling Must-Reads (That Got Us Talking)
We’re most proud of the content that offered genuinely fresh perspectives, challenging the vendor narratives in the market:
- ‘Beyond the Illusion: A Pragmatic Look at the Reality of Artificial Intelligence‘, September 2025, gave us the language to describe GenAI as a non-monopolistic ‘pattern service’, a needed counter-narrative to the idea of ’emergent consciousness’.
- ‘The Causal Barrier: Why True AI Agents Remain Elusive‘, Jun 2025, provided the deep technical explanation, drawing on DeepMind research, for why autonomous AI still lacks true causal understanding.
- The analysis ‘Databases Are Evolving in the AI Era… With Huge Implications For ERP‘, July 2025, was a game-changer, predicting that internal vendor development will make many of our clients’ custom AI projects obsolete in the next three years.
- And finally, our personal favourite: ‘Strategic Considerations for AI Video Tool Adoption – Lessons from the Dawn of Desktop Publishing‘, July 2025, providing an essential historical framework for managing the rollout of any new content technology.
Templates and Tools: From Strategy to Execution
We know your teams need efficient resources. To help you move from planning to action quickly, 2025 saw the release of several highly effective tools and templates, including:
- Cyber/Risk Essentials: ‘Security Policy Template Generator‘, October 2025, ‘Cyber Incident Response Plan Template‘, October 2025, ‘Acceptable Usage of IT Systems and Data Policy‘, October 2025, and the crucial ‘Risk Migration Framework‘, November 2025.
- Project and AI: The ‘AI Proof of Concept Project Prestart Checklist‘, July 2025, has been invaluable in preventing projects from stalling, complemented by ‘Project Prioritisation Tool – Light‘, September 2025 and ‘Project Action and Follow Up Register Template‘, September 2025.
- Strategy and Planning: The ‘Digital Workplace Persona Template‘, October 2025 and our comprehensive ‘Modern Information Management. Manage-in-Place Vendor Summary 2025‘, November 2025, are helping teams shape their future technology environments.
Our goal remains simple: to be your most pragmatic partner in navigating this exciting, yet challenging, technology landscape.
The Top 12 Unique ‘Next Step’ Recommendations
These top recommendations from 2025 papers demonstrate the practical, future-focused nature of our advice:
| 1 |  |
Stop Anthropomorphising AI: Clarify to stakeholders that AI is a ‘simulation of thought,’ not true cognitive understanding (‘Understanding ‘Reasoning’ in Generative AI’, May 2025). |
| 2 |  |
AI Budgeting: Mandate ‘TAONexus'(TBM-AI-OKR Nexus) to align AI spend with measurable business outcomes and manage the fragmented CapEx/OpEx cost duality (‘Strategic Value Realisation: AI Costs Management’, November 2025). |
| 3 |  |
Procurement Shift: Move the strategy for offsetting Microsoft’s deleted volume discounts from price negotiation to disciplined value management of existing licensed features (‘Navigating the 2025 Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Reset‘, September 2025). |
| 4 |  |
Data Sovereignty for AI: Confirm with vendors exactly where the vectors or graphs of their databases will be located to manage digital sovereignty risk for core business platforms (‘Databases Are Evolving in the AI Era‘, July 2025). |
| 5 |  |
AI Integration Caution: Do not rush towards creating custom AI agents that are likely to become standard offerings within core business solutions (‘Databases Are Evolving in the AI Era‘, July 2025). |
| 6 |  |
AI Proof-of-Concept Failure: Use the new ‘AI Proof of Concept Project Prestart Checklist‘, July 2025 to actively manage and avoid the primary reasons why AI PoCs fail in the transition to production. |
| 7 |  |
Empathy for Digital Services: For public sector websites, do not rush a chatbot, but rather focus first on redesigning services with ’empathy’ to serve vulnerable citizens (‘Digital Citizen Services‘, September 2025). |
| 8 |  |
Explainable AI for Action: Frame explainable AI (XAI) as a tool for ‘informed action’ and debugging (oversight), rather than just a mechanism for building trust (‘AI Explainability: More Than Trust’, June 2025). |
| 9 |  |
Vendor Liability: Update contracts to ensure audit rights for AI decision processes and secure substantive financial penalties against vendors for failures in AI services (‘Agentic AI and Leadership’s Duty of Care‘, October 2025). |
| 10 |  |
VMware De-risking: Conduct a full cost-benefit analysis and develop a long-term transition roadmap to alternative solutions to reduce financial exposure to Broadcom’s price increases (‘Navigating the VMware Shift One Year On‘, April 2025). |
| 11 |  |
AI Governance Focus: Establish an AI governance council and shift focus to governing the use case, not the model to enable innovation within safe guardrails (‘AI as the Engine of the Innovation Economy: Part 4‘, October 2025). |
| 12 |  |
AI Workforce: Implement an AI skills gap audit and develop upskilling programs to create a superagency workforce that leverages human and AI capabilities in synergy (‘AI as the Engine of the Innovation Economy: Part 3‘, September 2025). |
