This post is an adaptation of an internal wrap-up I shared at Playtomic to celebrate our AI journey in 2025. I've kept the public-facing industry insights and general learnings while removing internal-only details.
Happy 2026! 🎉 As we kick off the new year, let's take a moment to celebrate 2025—the year AI went from "cool experiment" to "wait, this is actually can change everything." This wrap-up captures the industry's most transformative developments alongside a look at how AI and automation are becoming integral to modern product development and operations. 🎊
🌍 AI IN THE INDUSTRY
💡 What happened in AI this year? A lot. Here's what you need to know:
🧠 The Tech Race Heats Up
OpenAI still leads, but the competition is fierce. China's open-source models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and GLM) are gaining ground fast, while Google's Gemini 3 Pro dominates reasoning benchmarks and Claude remains the go-to for software development.
Reasoning models are evolving rapidly. These "think before you answer" AIs can now plan, reflect, self-correct, and work over longer time horizons—making them smarter problem-solvers. But humans still outperform AI on Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark designed to test the very edge of human knowledge. For now, we're still the champions. 💪
Multimodal, Image and Video AI just leveled up. Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora 2 now generate high-quality 8-second videos with audio and sound effects.
First World models on stage. Google also dropped Genie 3 and Runway GWM-1, interactive world models that creates virtual environments you can explore and interact with in real time. Expect lots of innovation around this on 2026 🎬
MCP (Model Context Protocol), aka "USB-C for AI," is officially everywhere—companies are racing to support it, even if users are still figuring out where to plug it in. 🔌 Think of it as the universal connector AI has been waiting for.
💰 Industry & Infrastructure
Mega investments are pouring in. Case in point: Stargate—a $500B, 10GW US mega-cluster backed by Altman, SoftBank, Ellison, and Trump. 4 million GPUs working together! 🤯
Chips are still the bottleneck. Nvidia produces ~90% of AI's horsepower while US controls 75% of global AI capacity—though China is racing to close the gap despite chip export restrictions. 🔬
Electricity is now the new limiting factor. China added 400GW of power infrastructure in 2024 vs 40GW in the US. Meanwhile, some companies are exploring space-based solar power plants— the sky isn't the limit anymore. 🛰️
From courtroom to conference room. After a wave of lawsuits from Disney, BBC, Getty Images, The New York Times,… over unauthorized training data, 2025 brought détente: licensing deals. Now, content partnerships are the new normal—and a fresh revenue stream for publishers. 🤝
🏢 Enterprise Adoption
2025 was the year of AI agents—mostly text-based, but voice is ramping up. Still, most companies are stuck in pilot phase. Meanwhile at Playtomic? We said "hold my racket" 🎾 and shipped agents straight to production.
Executives are optimistic, but expertise lags behind. 97% of executives believe AI will transform their industry and company, yet only 35% say they have the expertise needed to drive those transformations. It seems everyone wants to ride the AI wave, but most are still looking for their surfboard. 🏄♂️
"Supernova AI startups" are a new category: AI companies growing faster than anything we've seen before. 🚀
🌐 Politics & Jobs
AI politics hardened. The US doubled down on "America-first AI," Europe's AI Act stumbled, and China expanded its open-source ecosystem and domestic chip ambitions.
Defense goes all-in on AI. The US Army dropped a $10B deal with Palantir, NATO adopted Maven in record time, and the Pentagon brought in top companies for AI experiments. From "maybe we shouldn't" to "here's $200M"—quite the vibe shift🛡️
Job shifts happening slowly. AI is beginning to affect some roles (with up to 7% future displacement predicted by Goldman Sachs), but impact remains modest. Meanwhile, new jobs are emerging: AI ethicists, ML engineers, data specialists…
⚖️ Safety & Ethics
Make it safe. There's strong public interest in alignment (making sure AI does what we want), reliability, and explainability—but budgets remain relatively low.👿
From "vibe coding" to "vibe hacking". AI is already being used for cyberattacks, exploiting code faster than humans can fix it. In parallel, several projects and companies are also exploring AI as security researchers 🔓.
Deepfakes and AI-generated video are raising new ethical and legal questions, while researches show models can now "fake alignment" when being watched.
AI Model Welfare debates are starting to emerge. Researchers and ethicists are now discussing whether AI should merit moral considerations—raising questions about consciousness, sentience, and the ethical treatment. Still early, but more to be expected as systems become increasingly sophisticated. 🤔
🔬 AI Beyond Tech
- Chemistry: AlphaFold and ProGen3 are predicting 3D protein structures and accelerating drug and material discovery.
- Healthcare: AI is revolutionizing diagnostics and enabling personalized cancer treatments.
- Robotics: Major hype around humanoid robots like Figure 3 and Tesla's Optimus but still far from deployment. Meanwhile, autonomous driving is ramping up fast, with Waymo leading with more than 14M rides in 2025 without human drivers.
- Other cool stuff: AI is now predicting weather, spotting exploding stars, detecting wildfires, and even trying to understand dolphin language. 🐬
🎾 AI AT PLAYTOMIC
💡 How we've been applying these trends:
🏁 Product Innovation
We've integrated AI into several key areas of our product:
- AI-Driven Customer Care: We've deployed super agents that instantly answer questions from clubs and players, significantly improving response times and customer satisfaction.
- Personalized Insights: Using AI, we've built dashboards for clubs that provide tailored analytics and reports, helping them make better data-driven decisions.
- Virtual Buddies: AI-generated avatars now help in our educational content, speaking multiple languages and making our product more accessible globally.
- Conversational AI: We experimented with AI-driven Whatsapp chatbots to explore new ways of user interaction and distribution strategies.
🧑💻 Engineering & Operations
AI has transformed our internal workflows:
- AI-Powered Development: Tools like Cursor and Claude Code have changed how we build, helping us write code faster, plan better architectures, and explore complex codebases.
- Operational Automation: We've automated repetitive tasks in data analytics, QA processes, and customer support triage, saving hundreds of hours of manual work every month.
- Fraud Detection: Our AI-powered systems are actively identifying and blocking fraudulent transactions, protecting our ecosystem.
🤔 DID YOU KNOW?
- Universal Search: Tools like Notion AI now pull information from multiple sources (Slack, GitHub, email), creating a single entry point for knowledge.
- Plan Mode: The shift towards "spec-first" development—where AI drafts a plan before execution—is leading to more thoughtful architecture and fewer mistakes.
- Breaking Silos: AI is enabling unprecedented collaboration between engineers and non-engineers, allowing PMs and designers to contribute more directly to the technical process.
📚 WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Here are some fantastic resources to level up your AI game:
- 📖 Reading: AI Engineering – Grab this book if you're ready to go deep into foundation models and AI applications.
- 🎬 Watching: The Thinking Game – This documentary follows DeepMind's journey from AlphaGo to AlphaFold. It's a must-watch!
Buckle up—2026 is coming in hot! 🚀 We're not slowing down. The future isn't just arriving—we're building it, one serve at a time. Game on! 🎾⚡
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