2025 AI Wrap Up

This Week

The signal-to-noise ratio in 2025 was tough to manage.

From the outside, it was a banner year. I achieved a longtime goal by teaching for Section and spent hundreds of hours guiding companies through the AI transition.

From the inside, however, it felt like a scramble.   

The "fear of missing out" is real, even when you are the one teaching the class. I caught myself constantly worrying about the next update or the next big model. New tools, new terms, new expectations… every week brought something else to figure out. 

I live and breathe this stuff, and I’d catch myself thinking: How is anyone with a day job supposed to stay on top of this? 

It’s so easy to get caught in the daily scroll of headlines, product launches, and hot takes, but when I zoom out, the anxiety eases a little and I realize just how much progress I’ve actually made.

So that’s what I’m doing this week: reflecting, reviewing, and pulling out the things that mattered most.

If 2025 felt like a blur, maybe this will help you zoom out too.

Let’s get into it.

What Does ChatGPT Think of Your 2025?

This year, I spent hundreds of hours with ChatGPT. And apparently, it noticed.

My 2025 Wrapped reads less like a report and more like a personality profile written by someone who knows all my innermost secrets (probably because it does!).

I use it as a strategy partner, workshop co-pilot and occasional therapist. My top prompts are “What am I missing?” and  “Help me refine this”.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s the prompt (make sure you have history turned on):

Review our full conversation history and generate a year-end “ChatGPT Wrapped” reflection analyzing how I used this tool over the past year.

Include These Sections :

• How I Used ChatGPT – the roles it played and what that reveals about my priorities.

• Top Themes – recurring topic areas and the deeper problems I was trying to solve.

• Prompt Patterns – how I tend to ask for help and what that says about how I think.

• Signature Style – tone, structure, constraints, and expectations that show up consistently.

• Strengths – where I show strong judgment, leverage, or synthesis.

• Friction Points – recurring challenges, blind spots, or inefficiencies.

• Big Wins – meaningful progress or momentum inferred from my usage.

• What to Work On Next – high-leverage improvements for the coming year.

• My unfair advantages and one strategic focus for next year.

Tone should be clear, candid, and insightful with light, dry humor.

If you want to turn it into a Spotify style carousel, send me a note and I email you the step-by-step PDF guide.

Build a Custom App in 5 Minutes With Empromptu

Given all the hype around vibe coding, I wanted to give it a try for myself. And since we're closing out the year, I decided to create fun app that predicts my specific AI Archetype.

The best part? I built it in 5 minutes using Empromptu, a new vibe coding platform with infinite memory and 98% accuracy. 

While my "AI Wrapped" app is just for fun, the business implications here are huge.

You no longer need a developer to build things like:

• Interactive lead magnets

• Voice of customer summarizers

• Employee onboarding assistants

• ROI calculators

• Sales pitch generators

If you’re ready to give vibe coding a try, then Empromptu is a great place to start. You can try it out for free here. 

And if you want to find out what you AI archetype is, head over to my app here.

The Top 5 AI Search & Content Articles from 2025

If you’re serious about staying relevant in marketing and discoverability, you should be following Andy Crestodina. He’s been leading the charge in AI search, helping content creators and marketers understand how to stay visible, relevant, and effective.

In his roundup of Orbit Media’s Top 5 Posts of 2025, he breaks down everything you need to know to stay visible today.

Here’s what made the list:

1. Is Your Website AI-Friendly?: A practical checklist to help you appear in LLMs.
   

2. The 7 Stages of AI Proficiency: A self-assessment tool to figure out where you (and your team) sit on the AI skills spectrum.
   

3. My Top 3 Reports for Lead Gen and Content Marketing: A walkthrough of must-build GA4 reports, including how to track CTA clickthrough rates.
   

4. Prompt Reverse Engineering: Ever wonder how leads from AI search engines find your brand? This one breaks it down, step-by-step.
   

5. How to Rank for 100+ Keywords Using Semantic SEO:  Andy shows you how to write for both humans and AI.

If you’re a content marketer, search optimizer, or just trying to stay ahead of the AI curve, you should subscribe to his guides.

Read the full article here.

The Year of the AI Architect

TIME named “The Architects of AI” its 2025 Person of the Year because AI and the people who built and deployed it dominated the year—transforming industries, concentrating economic and political power, and reshaping everyday life for better and worse. 

As TIME’s editors note, AI “roared into view” in 2025, accelerating medical research and productivity, producing dramatic breakthroughs, and becoming impossible to opt out of.

Read more at TIME.

The State of AI 2025

Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital released his annual State of AI Report 2025, which tracks the progress of artificial intelligence. The report has six key themes: Research, Industry, Politics, Safety, Survey, and Predictions, and spans 311 slides. 

They surveyed 1,183 professionals. Here are the most interesting points:

• 97.2% use generative AI at work.

• 93.7% also use it personally.

• 92% say it makes them more productive.

• 76% pay for AI tools themselves, with 56% spending $21+ per month for things like better speed and higher limits.

• Top pro use cases? Productivity (45%), coding help (30%), and research (25%).

• Popular tools outside the dev crowd? ElevenLabs (audio), Perplexity, and Midjourney (image).

Other highlights:

• Media vs AI is turning into media + AI: Over 700 news outlets are signing licensing deals with OpenAI and Amazon. At the same time, lawsuits keep stacking up. Anthropic agreed to a $1.5B copyright settlement with authors.

• ChatGPT is converting better than your marketing funnel: Retail traffic sent by ChatGPT converts at 11.4%, beating direct, paid search, email, display, and social.

• Google’s grip on search is slipping: Global traffic is down 8% YoY, driven in part by the 755M monthly users turning to AI-first search engines like ChatGPT.

• Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is a thing: AI-generated answers increase session depth, and content from lower-ranked sites is surfacing more often, giving smaller players a real shot at visibility.

• Browsers are turning into bots: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Perplexity are launching AI assistants built into browsers that can click, navigate, and complete multi-step tasks.

The full report is a beast, so if you don’t have time to read every page, drop it into NotebookLM and ask for your own personalized summary. 

AI Santa Goes Viral

An AI-powered Santa went viral this month, and after trying it myself, I get why. 

I had my own chat with Santa, and it was like talking to the real deal, if the real deal had a bit of cheek. 

He looked straight at me and complimented the scarf I was wearing, which means the AI is connected to the video feed and responding in real time, rather than offering canned holiday platitudes.

When I asked if I was on the nice or naughty list, he didn’t give me a straight answer.

Instead, he raised an eyebrow and asked, “Well, what exactly have you done that makes you think you might belong on the naughty list?” I couldn’t help laughing.

Who knew Santa was so sassy!?

That interaction alone showed just how far AI-powered conversation has come.

Built by Tavus, this Santa uses real-time video generation to hold personalized, responsive conversations, he remembers past chats, knows 26 languages, and brings some serious holiday magic—especially for kids who might not otherwise get the chance to “meet” Santa.

It’s one of the most delightful, creative applications of AI I’ve seen this season.

Talk with Santa here. 

Goodbye 2025

Happy Holidays, everyone! 🎄

And just like that, 2025 is in the books. What a wild year for AI!

I’m officially logging off to unplug, recharge my own batteries (no AI involved), and enjoy the holidays.

I’ll catch you on the flip side with fresh insights and new energy. Hope you get some serious downtime, too.

See you in 2026!

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