As we start the new year, I always think about trends that impact work for my clients, my other businesses and my own personal use of digital too. What digital experience trends might we expect in 2025 and what should I be paying the most attention to?

All this did was start another mental meander like the many others that have been plaguing me lately. You simply can’t think of digital experiences without having to think about AI. The year has just started and I don't even like typing those two letters out because of the risk of boring not only myself but everyone else too. Bored that is, if you are in any industry that has to think about the impact that AI is going to have. If you are anyone else, it seems that minds are already made up that Terminator 2 is about to play itself out.

Aside: Future articles 8 through 456528: Making personal sense of this exciting and frightening era we are being thrown into.

Wake up computer, open AI chatbot, start day

Like any good blank-canvas-phobe, I opened my current go-to AI chat tool and asked, “What are the digital experience themes to lookout for in 2025?” Yep, I don’t worry about grammar, spelling, and typos these days. I can keep having my “typing seizures,” as my daughter calls them, and clever AI seems to untangle the mess.

Have I started my day with an argument?

Claude.ai is my current co-pilot (take that, Microsoft!), and as expected, it spat out six themes. As I scanned the well-structured and well-written response, I found myself thinking: Rubbish… maybe… hmmmm, maybe but… yep, agree, not this year, agree, etc.

Then my skeptical analytical brain jumped into full swing. Maybe Claude had a big night out last night; maybe Claude’s machine learning program was in cahoots with some corporate sponsor and was leading me down some platform subscription path. Perhaps Claude knew I was running out of query tokens on my free plan, so it devised a way to hit my limit and present me with the dreaded [Upgrade] button.

Dear Claude, can I trust you?

Damn, I’m going to have to think after all

So I asked the same question, or “engineered my prompt” if we use plain language, to my other AI chatbot tools. Mostly I got the same answers but wondered if there wasn’t any platform that could ask all the AI chatbots at once for me. Remember, the whole purpose of AI is to make us so lazy—sorry, productive—so that all I do is watch my AI bot trade crypto and “earn $2000 a day” without having to work.

Well I found poe.com (https://poe.com/about) and asked Poe but got pretty much the same answer but at least I was using the “best AI from many different companies in a single interface across all of (my) devices”.

I saw Poe didn't integrate with Perplexity though so in one last ditch effort, I prompt-engineered Perplexity, and upped my game a bit.

“I am a UX consultant in South Africa. I would like to write an article that gives my thoughts about the digital experience trends to watch in 2025. I would like a plain language title and paragraph explaining each. I would also like a rating out of 10 that indicates the possible influence of each trend on digital experience design”.

Perplexity won this round. Themes were more generic and I mostly agreed with them, but in the process realised what was making me uncomfortable with the results I had seen so far. Understandably, the themes were identified by industry participants and were aimed at industry participants. The Large Language Models are still mostly summarising after all. Basically I was getting the digital industry’s thoughts on the digital industry. Obvious in retrospect, AI wasn't doing any thinking :).

Subconsciously I have been wondering about the themes from a user’s perspective. Things that might become more mainstream and affect us all, not just enthusiastic industry participants. So for example the suggested theme 6 “Sustainable Design Practices” would just get blank stares at the dinner table. To be frank also in most boardrooms that I present in as well as design huddles when we are working on a new interface. The theme might not be wrong, but really doesn’t feel realistic to me, my team or my current clients.

What the industry thinks

So what were the themes that were suggested by all the AI chatbots? Here is Perplexity’s answer:

• Hyper-Personalization
  AI analyzes user data to create uniquely tailored experiences and predict customer needs.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 9/10
  Garth Rating: 8 /10
  
• AI-Driven Customer Service
  AI and ML enhance support efficiency through automated, personalized assistance.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 8/10
  Garth Rating: 7 /10
  
• Immersive Technologies (AR/VR)
  AR and VR create interactive environments for enhanced product demonstrations and brand engagement.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 8/10
  Garth Rating: 1 /10
  
• Omnichannel Experiences
  Seamless integration across online and offline channels drives customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 7/10
  Garth Rating: 6 /10
  
• Voice Interfaces
  Voice-activated technology requires optimized experiences for easier navigation and accessibility.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 7/10
  Garth Rating: 8 /10
  
• Sustainable Design
  Eco-conscious design practices help brands connect with environmentally aware customers.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 6/10
  Garth Rating: 0 /10
  
• Digital Avatars
  AI-driven virtual representatives provide personalized engagement across retail and hospitality.
  AI Chatbot Importance Rating: 6/10
  Garth Rating: 1 /10

I will go through some of these in future articles because some are important if you care about digital experience design, no matter how invested you're in the field.

What I’m thinking

As you can see from my “tongue-in-cheek” scores above, I don't think some of these themes will affect you and me as users of AI much. Some are already impacting us in a big way but there are also some that I was surprised to see not mentioned.

What’s even more interesting is how the datasets that the tools we are using for free are so restricted by time. there was no mention of AI agents and if online media is to be believed, that is the ONLY digital trend for us to expect in 2025.

Here is a list of things that I will be paying mind too for the next while:

• How to get your business found in a flood of AI-generated gruel
• The death of software (as service) as we know it
• Whether or not customers can finally have proper conversations with businesses, not just support calls
• My worry about having to start the AI marathon by sprinting
• Why we are STILL arguing to include customers in our design thinking in 2025
• What size water pistols can defend me against the robot Armageddon

So until I get another December holiday and time to write something, bye for now 😊