AI in 2025: prioritize control, privacy, and specialization
2024 has been a year of rapid AI adoption, with many businesses scrambling to capitalize on the latest advancements for fear of being left behind. However, despite significant investment, organizations often struggle to realize tangible benefits from their AI initiatives. In fact, reports suggest that while 68% of large companies have integrated AI, a quarter of IT professionals regret rapid AI adoption, and two-thirds wish they had chosen technologies more carefully. Arguably, the root of this issue lies in a lack of control. Organizations are struggling to implement AI tools in a manner that not only brings benefits, but also does not compromise their data privacy. In 2025, businesses need to ensure they choose the right AI tool for the job while retaining the control and privacy their data needs. Simon Bain Social Links Navigation CEO of OmniIndex. Identify why you want an AI tool Before embarking on an AI initiative, it's crucial to define clear objectives. What specific problem are you trying to solve? What value do you expect to derive from AI? Is it threat intelligence, enhanced decision-making, or improved customer experience? It is only once these goals are identified that a business can know what type of AI they need. Crucial to this is finding the right tool for the job. The first step is to understand that while Large Language Models (LLMs) have been dominating the headlines and fueling the hype, they are not the only form of AI model. Instead, there are a number of different tools available that are focused on specialist tasks and solutions that may not only be more suitable, but also more able. This is because specialist AI is designed to tackle a specific task as opposed to being trained to offer a solution for everyone – both professionally and personally. What's more, unlike LLMs, which are trained on vast, often uncurated datasets, specialist AI models focus only on relevant data, resulting in higher accuracy and efficiency. Finally,…