Artificial Intelligence: Trends, tools and bloopers
What should my company be doing with AI? That’s the question everyone is asking right now. Is it going to reimagine customer service through the use of chatbots? Or is it going to reshape productivity within the business as it allows for employees to create their own workflows that cut down on admin? Or is it, perhaps, going to be something entirely unexpected.
Like the fact that it was first showing signs of promise in the 1970s with ELIZA, an algorithm that showed immense potential in the realm of language recognition and problem solving, and was not just used to win chess tournaments against famous players.
Since its first early steps, AI has proven itself a fascinating and constantly evolving technology with immense potential. Today, just over two years since ChatGPT rocked the world with its incredible capabilities and Microsoft put Copilot into its 365 ecosystem, AI is still out innovating itself.
Weak vs. Strong: AI defined
Generative AI – the AI found in solutions such as ChatGPT – is finding its feet across multiple applications and purposes. It is a chatbot for an airline, and it is a failsafe in a manufacturing plant. It is a financial services fraud detection tool, and it is a quick way to summarise vast quantities of content into relevant bullet points. It is also what IBM defines as artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) or weak AI. Its intelligence is narrowed down to do certain things in a certain way and is the most common form of AI.
Strong AI, or Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of the self-determining system capable of the same level of cognitive thinking as a human being. IBM defines it as ‘a theoretical form of AI where a machine would have an intelligence equal to humans’. It is self-aware and it can learn. This is not a technology available as yet, only appearing as a theoretical construct in research.
And yet, the baseline for what is possible with AI keeps changing…
AI: an intelligent trendsetter
AI is still dominating the headlines. Since ChatGPT took the global stage in 2022, the technology has continued to change and evolve. In 2025, some of the biggest AI models – Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google and QwQ-32B by Alibaba – have undergone some radical upgrades. Anthropic’s Claude has expanded into 3.7 Sonnet and Opus 4, offering both hybrid and enhanced reasoning with coding and API abilities; while Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 has introduced its own more powerful enhanced reasoning, long-context and multimodal capabilities.
Looking ahead, there are some trends shaping the future of AI within the business and consumer spaces, and these are some of the most interesting:
Strong vs. Weak may become Weak vs. Average
A year ago, most experts felt that AGI was unlikely to appear any time soon. Today, that estimate has changed – some AGI leaders are forecasting AGI over the next three to 10 years, while most academics and experts are expecting it to only appear between 2040 and 2061. While there is disagreement around when it will come, most agree it is inevitable. It is expected to be less of a giant leap into intelligence and more of a gradual continuum as AI systems incrementally exhibit more capabilities.
Quantum AI
Quantum computing has been perhaps as much a focus of conversation as AI, although on a deeper scale. This form of compute is incredibly powerful but also incredibly heavy on computing power. Requiring intensely powerful technology to perform to its full potential, quantum isn’t readily available to the business on the street today. However, it has potential, and when combined with AI it can radically reimagine how quickly companies and systems can process data, solve problems and transform computing capabilities.
Quantum computing has rapidly advanced since 2024 when it was mostly used in high-end environments and is now being driven by Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft. Power and infrastructure remain challenges however, still limiting its uptake, but when combined with AI, quantum is making impressive inroads into drug discovery and other key areas of research and development.
Automation and security
Intelligent process automation is a huge positive for many industries, specifically manufacturing and mining. It can be used to automate processes within complex environments, reducing risk and improving worker safety and wellbeing. These tools also take over the boring and mundane tasks that sit in the background, freeing up human capital to work on more complex and relevant tasks. AI is adding intelligence to automation, which is streamlining workflows, reducing errors and delivering rapid insights. It’s also changing how workers and companies respond to issues and compliance requirements.
As for security, well it has become the new frontier for AI and automation. Proactive and intelligent solutions are leveraging AI to combat attackers who are also using the same tools to launch faster and more sophisticated attacks. Think deepfakes, adaptive malware and hyper-realistic phishing scams. Companies are rapidly adopting AI-driven security solutions to build defences that are capable of detecting and mitigating threats in real time, far faster than humans can achieve. However, these systems are working in collaboration with humans – where AI identifies and track threats, skilled security experts are essential to oversight, strategy and crisis management.
AI: The tools changing the world of work
It’s become very easy for companies to tap into the AI revolution. Companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple have all leapt into the AI space with solutions designed to enhance the world of work or improve the ways in which people engage with technology. These are the most exciting and powerful tools on the market today:
- Claude – Claude remains a top-tier enterprise AI which excels at advanced reasoning, vision analysis, coding, multilingual processing and complex analysis. Now offering a personal touch with chat history search, custom preferences, project instructions, and tone controls. Two modes—instant replies or deep thinking power advanced agents, while privacy stays central with no default data retention.
- Copilot – Microsoft’s Copilot is arguably the most famous of the AI companions (after ChatGPT) because it has been integrated comprehensively into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It is powered by OpenAI’s GPTs and has multi-agent orchestration, smart mode for automated query routing, and enhanced memory and analytics tools. Recent updates enhance the user experience, refine tools, and broaden language support.
- Gemini – Google’s AI-powered chatbot has surged ahead and has become a leader in AI reasoning, code generation and multimodal data. Its deep contextual AI thinks internally before responding and it has an unmatched context window of up to one million tokens that allows for massive, nuanced data analysis. Gemini brings advanced coding and maths to anyone’s desktop.
- Midjourney – this GenAI tool remains the gold standard in AI image generation with its latest versions offering hyper-realistic cinematic visuals and a full-featured user-friendly web experience. It has advanced editing and personalisation capabilities but it is fighting off growing competition from DALL-E 4 and Leonardo AI.
- ChatGPT – still the top choice for conversational tasks, writing, brainstorming and logical reasoning, it is easily integrated into third-party applications and delivers multiple variations suited to different markets and requirements. Easily still the market leader, ChatGPT launched GPT-5 in August 2025 which adds deep thinking and fast modes as well as improved performance across coding, maths, writing and questions. The older models are available via paid plans after significant consumer backlash..
- Grok – is the AI developed by Elon Musk and integrates within X. The platform has strong reasoning, live social interaction, maths and image generation, but it remains a controversial platform. Grok brings exceptional logic and reasoning skills and is easily one of the best on the market.
The list of AI tools is now so extensive that it’s hard to pinpoint the clear winners, so notable mentions include GitHub Copilot for developers, Jasper for marketing content creation, NotebookLM and Perplexity for research, and Canva Magic Studio for design.
AI: The blooper reel
AI is as susceptible to making mistakes as the people that code it. Over the past year, as companies have become more confident with their AI investments and strategies, there have been some real gems. Here are some of the best (and the worst):
- The DPD customer service chatbot was supposed to help with package tracking but instead started swearing at customers, criticised its own employer and even wrote sarcastic poems mocking the company’s delivery service. All the result of clever customer prompt manipulation.
- DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that was named the ‘ChatGPT killer’ was subject to a major cyberattack which resulted in extensive downtime and reputational damage. The platform’s impressive rise to the top of the popularity rankings made it a target and it hasn’t quite recovered since then.
- Hallucinations are on the increase. One of the most documented cases of how AI tends to invent reality is when Google’s own chatbot produced a factual error that caused the parent company, Alphabet, to lose $100 billion in market value.
There are many other bloopers with AI, and many highlight the ethical concerns that the technology raises. For example, there is a clear racial and gender bias in many of the mistakes made by bots in applications, healthcare and chats. The Amazon AI-recruitment tool only recommended men, a Microsoft chatbot turned racist and sexist, and a healthcare algorithm didn’t even notice black patients, removing them entirely from its recommendations.
The future of this technology may not be set in stone, but its use cases and careful consideration of bias and ethics should be. It’s a superb technology, but must remain within the right boundaries to ensure people and businesses remain protected.
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