According to a new report, many businesses expect to increase their budgets for generative AI in 2025.

If there was one lesson that was extraordinarily clear at this year’s CES, it’s that generative AI is poised to be a massive force for businesses in the coming months and years. You couldn’t walk 10 steps through the Las Vegas Convention Center halls without encountering a new product featuring or promoting artificial intelligence in some form or fashion. AI spending doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon, either. Businesses spent $13.8 billion on genAI in 2024. That’s five times the $2.3 billion spent in 2023, according to data from Menlo Ventures. But determining what to spend on generative AI, whether it’s as a tool to help employees or a feature to include in your product or service, can be a challenge. Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer—and even some experts say they’re stumped, since AI is still such a new field. KPMG’s latest AI Quarterly Pulse Survey shows that 68 percent of large companies plan to invest between $50 million and $250 million over the next year. And a growing number of leaders are prepared to spend. One year ago, just 45 percent of companies planned investments in that price range. Among small businesses, the number is, of course, much lower. A report from ServiceDirect found over half of small businesses plan to spend more than $10,000 per year on AI tools. The amount they plan to spend varies by the size of the company. Some 58 percent of businesses with fewer than 10 employees plan to increase their AI budgets by more than $5,000 over the next 12 to 24 months, while 67 percent of businesses with 10 to 50 employees plan to increase their budgets by that amount or more in the same time frame. Among companies with more than 50 employees, 77 percent expect to increase their budgets by more than $5,000 on AI solutions in the next 12 to 24 months—on top of their existing heavy investments in the technology. ROI and pricing The big question, of course, is what sort of return will businesses see on their investment? The frenzy surrounding the technology has prompted some companies to adopt AI even when the benefits are questionable at best. (At the aforementioned CES, AI was being incorporated into everything from air fryers to plants.) Only one-third of leaders surveyed by KPMG say they expect to be able to measure the return on their investment in the next six months, with none believing they have yet reached that stage. “Leaders are putting real dollars behind agents, but with mounting pressure to demonstrate ROI, getting the value story right is critical,” said Steve Chase, vice chair of AI and digital innovation at KPMG, in a statement. “The dynamic nature of AI demands new ways to measure value—beyond the limits of a conventional business case. As leaders work to define the right metrics, those measures must be tightly aligned with the business strategy and should account for the cost of not investing.” Part of the problem is the cost of generative AI in the first place. James D. Wilton, a former associate partner at McKinsey & Company and founder of Monevate, a pricing and monetization consulting firm, makes the argument that the pricing models AI firms currently use are hurting the industry’s adoption. There are two types of pricing models used most frequently these days among AI companies: license fees and per-query charges. Neither is ideal, says Wilton. The subscription model assumes a one-size-fits-all approach, but that license fee is often so high that it is unaffordable for smaller users. The charge-per-query might make more sense, but users don’t get value every time they ask a genAI system a question. It often takes several iterations before the technology gives you the answer you’re looking for. “The challenge is it’s not very value aligned,” says Wilton. “It’s aligned to the costs the AI generators will incur, but that’s not necessarily where the value is for the user.” One alternative, he says, is outcome-based pricing models, which charge businesses per satisfactory resolution. (Zendesk offers something like this currently, he notes.) “The more directly you can tie your pricing to the way the product creates value, the lower the ROI you need to give the customer, because the customer will do less work in order to realize the value,” he says. BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE

The Most Exciting Tech for Your Business at CES 2025

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is drawing to a close in Las Vegas. Known as the gadget-head’s Super Bowl, CES is both the launchpad for the next big things in tech, as well as a home for plenty of less serious inventions. Flavor-enhancing spoon, anyone? As usual, this year’s CES was no different, offering an array of weird and wonderful gadgets and announcements from some of the top leaders in tech. Here are a selection of some that could actually help your business—or just come in handy as you run it. AI-powered laptops Sure, you could spring for a $3,000 supercomputer from the AI behemoth itself, Nvidia, but PC-maker Lenovo also announced a suite of AI-powered commercial computers, some that come at a kinder price point. Lenovo’s AI-powered commercial laptops, the ThinkPad X9 14 Edition and X9 15 Aura Edition, range in cost from $1,399 to $1,549, whereas its ThinkCentre neo 50q QC desktop starts at just $849. The new ThinkPads come with an AI assistant built in. Lenovo AI Now is based on Meta’s Llama 3.0 LLM, but stores user data locally. It helps users search and summarize documents and retrieve information across various devices, among other things. The ThinkCentre neo 50q QC is marketed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses, due to its compact form and AI-powered performance. It features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips or Snapdragon X Plus 8-core processors. A super fast phone charger Nothing tosses a wrench into a workday like a dead battery. Enter Swippitt, a three-part “Instant Power System” that is meant to fully restore a phone’s charge in only two seconds. The system consists of a toaster-sized and toaster-shaped charging hub that contains five charged batteries, a phone case with a smart battery, as well as an app. After inserting a dying phone into the hub, it swaps a used battery out of the case for a charged one. (You’ll need to use the system’s Link case for everything to work.) The Swippit offers compatibility for iPhones 14 and above for now, but is expected to launch for Android later in 2025. Here’s more on how it works. Add one to your office and no one will complain of a low phone battery again. A temperature-regulating chair If you’ve ever dreamed of moving your car’s seat warmer into your office chair—this one’s for you. Razer’s Project Arielle contains both a self-regulating heater that can reach 86 degrees fahrenheit, and bladeless fan technology that pushes air through the chair’s mesh back, as TechCrunch reported. A panel built into the chair controls the features. Although technically a gaming chair, Project Arielle seems like it could have great applications for long days spent in overly chilly or warm offices—if it ever goes into production. For now, it is still a concept, but think about how quickly it could help you be more productive (or just fall asleep at your desk). An AI travel agent Five years after teasing the product during CES 2020, Delta announced its AI-powered Delta Concierge. For now, the concierge service will offer suggestions based on a person’s travel plans with natural language text and voice input, instead of conventional menu selection. In the future, Delta aspires for the assistant to remove some uncertainty from flying by helping to rebook flights in the case of delays or cancellations, navigating unfamiliar airports and even managing transportation after leaving the airport—potentially with its new travel partner, Uber. It will be found in the Fly Delta app. Smart glasses to get you off your phone Smart glasses were all the rage at CES. They ran the gamut from simple designs that play with lens color or contain bluetooth speakers to augmented-reality glasses tricked out with screens and battery packs. Somewhere in the middle are the types of glasses The Verge referred to as “all day companions,” that mimic the size and approximate weight of regular glasses but with built-in display, AI assistants and—in some cases—camera capabilities. These glasses could amp up productivity with notifications available at a glance—or at the very least endow you with the swagger of an early adapter. A robot bartender for those in-office happy hours Let’s be real. A robot bartender may not be essential, and it may not improve efficiency, but it could very well take the edge off of the day. Richtech Robotics announced an AI-powered, robot bartender called ADAM. Intended for the hospitality industry, the robot can make more than 50 kinds of drinks from cocktails to coffee drinks and can even chat a little. Not only that, but ADAM is already at work inside a Georgia Walmart, as well as in the Texas Rangers baseball stadium. BY CHLOE AIELLO, REPORTER @CHLOBO_ILO

As You Bet on AI, Make Sure It’s Not Your Strategy That’s Artificial

There was an axiom we used in venture capital that said that the industry had a memory of only 10 years. Whatever was learned 10 or more years past, in other words—from what to avoid, to what to prioritize—was said to be forgotten, only to be painfully re-learned repeatedly at decade intervals. The origin of the phrase was directly tied to the lesson that the predicted impact of any new innovation is always grossly overstated. You don’t have to have ever worked in venture investing to know this to be true. Just flip back in your memory to see. An eon ago, the fax machine was claimed to foretell the end of physical mail. It wasn’t, nor years later was email, though it too was unveiled with similar claims. Desktop computing was boasted to be the demise of large data management and mainframe computing. To be sure, desktops, then laptops, then smartphones all dramatically changed how we do what we do; but the cloud and server farms show the prediction to have been over-imagined. Most artifical intelligence innovations are simply tools. These tools’ actual impact occurs only in the context of the larger purposes, plans, and strategies they serve. Yet, too often, we speak of the innovation as strategy itself, as if “using more artificial intelligence in 2025 and beyond” is enough to represent a strategy. It’s not. It’s also why this latest version of this repeated lesson isn’t just about overstatement. It’s about confusing tools and tactics with strategy. In the last year, my research has put me in touch with many of the organizations considered leaders in AI, including in determining its uses in and impact on business. Even those developing the tools feel a sense of marvel at what AI can do. In turn, they’ve spent much of the past few years striving to put AI to work as quickly as possible, in part for its speculated promises, and no doubt too for the assumed rewards AI might bring. For the AI developers paying close attention, two things give them pause. The first has caught most of them by surprise: AI is proving to have power beyond what even its designers know, and to a degree, none of them can predict nor control fully. In response to that particular awakening, in 2023, a group of leading firms suggested that there should be a collective pause taken to think about the deeper implications of what AI might bring, consider the possible ripple effects that might result, and jointly explore how shared guidelines might be followed. Some, surprisingly quite a few, were willing to sign on to a formal agreement. Few were prepared to act. The technology’s promises, even unverified, were just too great not to speed ahead, logic be damned. The cost of confusing AI tools with strategy. The second thing giving leaders in AI pause was more disturbing in its implications. It was the stark reality that in the rush to embrace AI, an increasing numnber of organizations suddenly found themselves struggling to answer seemingly simple questions like: What business are we in? So busy were they chasing the tool, that they found themselves suddenly having a hard time remembering what business goals, mission, even strategy the tool was there to support. Almost without their noticing, their priorities had become unintentionally inverted, with the tool no longer the supporting mechanism, but instead the dominant focus. It began firm by firm, but the error of putting AI ahead of the strategies it should be supporting has quickly developed into a disturbing, even dangerous trend. As broader evidence, a recent report from consulting firm McKinsey & Company called this out, and warned of the costs of confusing tools and tactics with strategy. “It’s time for a reset,” McKinsey declared. “The initial enthusiasm and flurry of activity (around AI) is giving way to second thoughts and recalibrations as companies realize that capturing AI’s enormous potential value is harder than expected.” More than just a passing observation, McKinsey was blunt. “With 2024 shaping up to be the year for AI to prove its value,” they wrote, “companies should keep in mind the hard lessons learned … that competitive advantage comes from building organizational and technological capabilities.” It isn’t that AI has no role, it made clear, referring specifically to generative AI. But incorporating it into any organization’s strategy cannot take form as a simple add-on. To leverage AI effectively means “rewiring the business.” Any experienced leader with a memory stretching beyond any one innovation cycle understands that strategy is an ongoing recalculation—a reconsideration, reconfirmation, and if need be a reorganization—of how all the pieces and parts that give an organization advantage fit together. Including its tools. Thoughtlessly adding anything new or blindly jumping on the latest bandwagon in and of itself yields no lasting advantage. As magical as AI seems right now, it must be part of this larger recalculation. It is not a strategy in and of itself. Without a doubt, AI will bring change–it already has–and advantages, though likely different than those predicted. It will not, however, displace the fundamental truth that ongoing success requires far greater strategic thought and effort. EXPERT OPINION BY LARRY ROBERTSON, FOUNDER, LIGHTHOUSE CONSULTING @LRSPEAKS

5 AI Tools to Save You Time

Work smarter, not harder. This adage has always rung true for me. In the age of AI, it’s no longer just a good idea. It’s a necessity. As the CEO of DOXA Talent, a conscious outsourcing company that helps businesses build high-performing, borderless teams, I constantly think about the future of work. Instead of resisting change, I embrace it at every turn. When AI tools started popping up, it was a no-brainer for me to incorporate them into my daily routine. With my never-ending to-do list and the constant demands that come with running a business, it’s been a complete game-changer. Leaders who aren’t leveraging AI are missing out on valuable opportunities to save time, optimize brainpower, and elevate themselves and their businesses. Here are some tools that have enabled me to do just that. Perplexity AI Whether I want to know about the latest tools for streamlining project management for borderless teams or ways to optimize the onboarding process for new clients, Perplexity AI is my go-to for answering questions. Similarly to ChatGPT, this research and conversational search engine answers queries using natural language predictive text. What makes it better than GPT-4 is the accurate, up-to-date information and citations it provides. I’m also a big fan of the ability to ask questions via voice or text, which adds even more flexibility to my busy days. Fathom There’s a good reason why Fathom is a top-rated AI notetaker. This tool has completely transformed my meetings for the better. Gone are the days when note-taking during meetings was a necessity. Fathom records, transcribes, highlights, and summarizes key points from Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meetings. It even composes action items afterward, so you don’t have to. This AI tool has made it possible for me to completely focus on the conversation at hand, allowing me to think more strategically and enhance productivity. Plus, if I ever need to revisit key sections of a call, they’re easy to find and just a click away. After integrating Fathom into my day-to-day life, the thought of any leader going without it is, well, unfathomable. Loom AI If you haven’t jumped on the Loom AI train yet, you’re missing out on one of the easiest and most effective ways to communicate with your team. Loom in and of itself is a handy tool for sharing video messages that have a more personal touch. Loom AI has made it even easier to effectively communicate with team members with features like AI-generated titles, summaries, and custom messages that can be used when you share Looms. It also auto-assigns action items and removes filler words, which are huge timesavers for me. With studies showing that video messaging improves information recall by up to 83 percent as compared with text-only messaging, Loom AI is an indispensable tool for clear, effective communication. Speechify Read three times faster, remember two times more, and reduce your stress. That’s what Speechify promises to you, and as a CEO constantly on the go, I’ve found it invaluable. This text-to-speech AI allows me to listen to any website, document, or book of my choosing. It’s available via mobile, Chrome extension, and desktop app, making it incredibly convenient. Simply put, if you’re a busy professional, Speechify is a must. PhantomBuster Do you find lead generation to be time-consuming and costly? Me, too—but in the age of AI, it doesn’t have to be. Enter PhantomBuster, the AI tool that’s taking the lead in a new era of lead generation. Thanks to PhantomBuster, my team and I have been able to cast a wide net on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, build new relationships on those platforms, and nurture existing ones. It’s never been easier to gather information about potential leads and leverage automation to network with them. With PhantomBuster, you get more leads with less effort (just like it says on its site). I can’t think of a single CEO who wouldn’t want to scale their business with that model. The reality is, AI tools aren’t going anywhere. With an expected annual growth rate of 37 percent from 2023 to 2030, they will only continue to transform the way we work and run our businesses. Leaders who embrace this technology now will have a competitive edge over those who resist it. As for me, I’m going to only continue to add to this list. AI tools don’t just help us keep up. They empower us to get ahead. I plan to take full advantage of that. EXPERT OPINION BY ENTREPRENEURS' ORGANIZATION @ENTREPRENEURORG