The AI Reckoning: My Predictions for 2025

AI is woven into every corner of modern life, inspiring both awe and eye rolls.

But despite the hype, most people wildly overestimate what AI can actually do on its own.

There are AI models that write essays, create stunning visuals, and even compose music, but behind every so-called “masterpiece” is a real person fine-tuning the process. They’re adjusting sliders, refining prompts, and steering the system toward something usable. It’s not magic, it’s teamwork, even if one teammate is a tireless bot.

At its best, AI shines in repetitive or data-driven tasks like web scraping, analyzing trends, or generating a rough first draft. But left unsupervised, it quickly shows its limitations. The result? Content that feels lifeless, overly generic, and often riddled with strange visual artifacts that make it unmistakably artificial.

Many managers and decision-makers are missing this nuance. They’re assuming AI can autonomously crank out polished work at a minimal cost, setting deadlines that are too tight and budgets that are too thin.

Workers are left doing the heavy lifting, but the bot gets the credit (and the human gets the stress).