This Week In AI Business - CES 2025 Edition (Week #2-2025)
This was the week of CES 2025, yet before I get to it, I want to highlight how 2024 was both an exciting and challenging year in AI.
In fact, while 2024 has been a transformative year for AI (we moved beyond LLMs, to agents, and reasoning), yet it was also marked by massive tech layoffs, with 150,000 job cuts across 542 companies.
This period of restructuring reflects an industry grappling with rapid change and evolving priorities as businesses adapt to new realities.
With some major patterns from the data:
Major Corporations Scaling Back: Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla implemented significant layoffs, highlighting challenges in profitability and growth across big tech.
Startups Hit Hard: Many startups faced funding shortages and profitability issues, leading to closures or downsizing, underscoring the difficulties in sustaining early-stage ventures in a competitive market.
AI and Automation Impact: The adoption of AI technologies contributed to workforce reductions, particularly in customer support, engineering, and content roles, as automation replaced traditional jobs.
Sector-Specific Struggles: Industries like clean energy, EV startups, gaming, and entertainment encountered unique challenges tied to shifting market demands and competition.
Cost-Cutting and Restructuring: Financial pressures led to layoffs at companies like Salesforce, PayPal, and Meta as businesses sought to streamline operations and reduce costs.
Post-Pandemic Correction: Firms that experienced rapid growth during the pandemic faced a downturn in demand, necessitating workforce reductions as the market normalized.
Unfortunately, we can expect this to be a reality for the next 5-10 years as we all figure out what it means to start integrating AI into the core of every organization on earth.
From there, the good news is, to me, we’ll start seeing the development of new job functions on the service side. Thus, a “new AI market” where many humans will still be needed for a new set of commercial use cases we didn’t know could exist.
I’ll also give you a glimpse into what it means in 2025 and how to deal with it.
You will find the complete data on AI funding, trends, and lay-off data in ChiefFinancialOfficerAI, where you can query it with an AI Assistant.
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You can see what key news and trends closed in 2024:
And the trends that opened 2025:
I’ve also published The Web²: The AI Supercycle, which is all you have to know to understand where we’re going in the coming decades for the development of the AI industry.
This also comes as a video session:
![The "AI Supercycle" [Video Version]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F154211846%2Fa6b4d432-ef1f-4dd6-8a75-a03175235633%2Ftranscoded-63666.png)
