With the global AI market set to grow by 38% in 2025 (Teneo), adapting to and understanding AI is no longer just a helpful additive to your business, but a critical move to allow your company to stay up to date.
This is one of the key AI stats that businesses need to consider when planning out their strategy for AI adoption this year.
We break down employee reactions, the investment opportunity and which AI technologies are leading the way.
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Market projections
Statista claims that the size of the Artificial Intelligence market is projected to reach US$243.72bn in 2025. It is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2025-2030) of 27.67%, resulting in a market volume of US$826.73bn by 2030.
Despite the launch of Chinese rivals such as Deepseek, and investments from the EU and other markets, the US will continue to be the largest AI market in 2025, valued at US$66.21bn, according to Statista numbers.
China, meanwhile, has an AI industry that reached around $34.20 billion by the end of 2024. The AI market in Europe stood at just over €42 billion by the end of 2024, a near doubling of the market value from 2020.
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Employee endorsement
So what is driving AI adoption? Despite reporting of widespread fears over job replacement, workers are leading the way in the current AI boom, with an understanding gap existing between what leaders believe their employees think about AI and the actual opinions they hold.
Nearly all employees (94%) and C-suite leaders (99%) say they have some level of familiarity with generative AI tools, but businesses could be underestimating how ready their staff are to adopt AI practices.
That is one of the key takeaways from a recent McKinsey report into AI readiness that found that business leaders estimate just 4% of employees use genAI for at least 30% of their daily work, while employees are much more positive.
Just a fifth of C-suite leaders believe employees will use gen AI for more than 30% of their tasks within a year – far lower than the employees themselves, who are twice as likely to believe this (47%).
The report goes on to find that 39% of employees are AI optimists who want to collaborate with their companies to create responsible solutions. Meanwhile, 37% said they are more sceptical about AI and want extensive top-down AI regulations.
Furthermore, 20% of those polled said they wanted to see AI deployed quickly with minimal guardrails, while just 4% said they had a fundamentally negative view of AI.
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Agent of change
Gartner identified Agentic AI as the biggest upcoming tech trend in 2025 and it is easy to see why. The likes of Salesforce, NVIDIA and Google’s Gemini have all made plays to either directly provide Agents solutions, or build frameworks for the next generation of AI.
Today, 10% of organisations already use AI agents, while more than half plan to use them in the next year, and 82% plan to integrate them within the next three years, according to a Capgemini survey of 1,100 executives at large enterprises.
A third of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024, according to figures from Gartner. This means 15% of day-to-day work decisions are to be made autonomously.
AI could contribute up to US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined. Of this, US$6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and US$9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption-side effects (PWC).
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The biggest AI tools
ChatGPT remains the most-used AI tool, according to survey numbers from Future Publishing, but the rest of the field is closing the gap.
37% of respondents in a recent Future survey said they used ChatGPT (39% in the US, 35% in the UK), with the OpenAI-owned platform growing by 7%.
Google Gemini is the second most popular AI with 27% usage in the US, but just 18% in the UK, giving it an average of 22.5%.
Microsoft Copilot came in third, Future said, with around 20% of users saying they’d accessed the service. Grammarly and Microsoft’s Image Creator rounded out the top five. Perplexity, Claude, and Dall-E all appear in the top ten.
However, this could all be usurped by the entrance of Chinese AI Deepseek. Both the Android and Appstore app’s shot to number one when the Chinese company launched its new large language models last month.
Read more: 2025 Informed: the year of Agentic AI
