DeepL leaders’ AI predictions for 2025

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way in 2024. So what should we expect in the next 12 months? We asked DeepL’s leadership team for their predictions as to where AI will take us in 2025. Here are their takes on the trends to look out for, the leaps forward in technology that will make them possible, and the applications of AI that will deliver the greatest value.

The future of AI models lies in tailored, custom solutions 

Over the past year or two, we've seen the excitement around general-purpose AI models outpace their value. The reality of their impact has been much more gradual. In 2025, it’s specialized, tailored AI solutions that will continue to dominate, solving specific industry challenges and delivering tangible ROI for businesses. These models are currently much more mature than general-purpose models; they've been around longer, allowing more time to refine their capabilities and better align them with real-world needs. 

We also expect to see specialized models become more robust and include general-purpose aspects as part of their architecture. Looking even further into the future, I think the lines between general and specialized will blur, making room for the rise of more hybrid models with specialized and domain-specific customizations layered on top.

Jarek Kutylowski

CEO and Founder

Voice translations will advance through contextual understanding 

The next big thing for voice AI translations will be getting an even better handle on context. Right now, current systems are all about accurately perceiving spoken words. But the real challenge—and opportunity—is reasoning. Humans are great at understanding what's unsaid through subtle cues like tone and volume, and this is where voice AI will make big leaps next year, and in the years ahead. By expanding its ability to interpret and reason about context, voice technology will be able to deliver even more seamless, intuitive interactions.

Sebastian Enderlein

Chief Technology Officer

In 2025, users will shape and collaborate more with AI 

There's a lot of focus on the future of model size and technical advancements, but the real story of 2025 will come from unlocking the full potential of existing AI capabilities and enhancing human-AI collaboration. Right now, interacting with AI platforms is a relatively static process: you input data and receive a response. In 2025, this interaction will become far more dynamic. AIs will not only understand users better, but will proactively offer suggestions, collaborate meaningfully, and adapt to individual needs. Many of these advanced, personalized capabilities already exist but are limited to researchers or developers. Bridging this gap and improving the user experience will be one of the most impactful advancements, allowing users and organizations to create and customize their own models and interactivity. Working with an AI will increasingly feel like working with a smart coworker. 

Training and data synthesis will help break through the scaling problem 

We need new ideas to push the boundaries of AI scaling laws. In the short run, creating more data seems like the most promising approach. While naive approaches to synthetic data can hurt AI quality, with careful execution, cleverly leveraging this wealth of feedback can boost AI model performance in a wide range of tasks.

There is also a lot of room to make AI training more energy and data-efficient. The current approach is still very basic and consumes a lot of energy. An interesting analogy is the human brain, which consumes about 20 watts of power. By the age of 20, this adds up to a total energy consumption of 3.5 MWh (3.5 megawatt hours), but this is over 17,000 times less power consumption than training some of the most popular AI models out there! Better optimization algorithms can unlock huge efficiency gains, which is an under-explored area of research. This area is critical and will continue to be through 2025, although breakthroughs may come later.

Edge computing is not the future of Language AI (yet)

For certain AI applications, especially those that are more sensitive to network latency, we're already seeing successful use of edge acceleration, such as in robotics. But edge computing inherently lags behind centralized data centers in terms of computing power because it relies on limited local resources. In the context of language AI, while the transition to edge computing is likely to happen eventually, we expect that meaningful language AI models will continue to rely on supercomputers and data centers in the present and near future.

Stefan Mesken

VP of Research

Written translation will become more collaborative and context-aware 

Written translation will go beyond just accuracy and quality—which are already strong, and areas in which DeepL will continue to push boundaries—to focus more on customization and interactivity. The real opportunity is to make these models understand who you are and what you're doing, so they can work with you, shaping results to your own distinct goals and preferences. This is going to change what it's like to get translations, making the experience more dynamic, intuitive, and tailored than ever before.

Christopher Osborne

Vice President of Product

AI will accelerate hyper-personalized, more consistent marketing 

We live in a hyper-personalized world—custom coffee, made-to-order clothing, and on-demand news feeds. Brands are even now tailoring their marketing messages and language to every customer in their preferred language, style, and tone. However, consistency of language across all of these personalized streams is also central to successful marketing. Research shows that it boosts revenue by 20% or more. 

Achieving this consistency across borders and languages is tough. It requires not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation to ensure that messages resonate the right way. If advertisers and marketers don't get this right, they’ll open themselves up to misunderstandings, wasted resources, and missed growth opportunities. 2025 will be an exciting year for the marketing world as we start seeing better understanding of how AI can help strengthen customer relationships and businesses’ bottom lines.

Steve Rotter

Chief Marketing Officer

AI will be a collaborative legal team member 

AI will no longer be viewed merely as a tool, but as an important team member within the legal profession. It will transform the way we work and help us be more efficient, collaborate better, and innovate like never before. 

AI won't replace lawyers, but rather give us the capacity to do more of the interesting work. For instance, my team has successfully rolled out a chatbot to handle routine and repetitive customer contract inquiries, as well as general legal questions—particularly in areas where there is a lot of legal and guidance material, like privacy. This has given our lawyers more freedom to focus on more complex and strategic tasks. Being able to extract large quantities of data by simply uploading documents is also a game changer. With the help of AI, there will be many more exciting and empowering tasks for junior lawyers than the due diligence review of reams of contracts I did in the early 2000s!

Frankie Williams

Chief Legal Officer

Businesses will move past AI for AI’s sake

The increased awareness of AI in the public consciousness has been a huge accelerant for enterprise adoption, with many organizations testing new solutions to improve their output and team efficiency. We’re going to continue to see this test-and-learn attitude from many companies, but 2025 will be the year where more is done to narrow down the tools that are actually being used. AI for the sake of AI is likely to reduce, with the onus shifting to whether the solution is solving an actual problem. Organizations with this mindset will also drive down the risk of Shadow AI, where team members use unsanctioned tools. Specialized models are likely to be one of the winners of this shift in attitude, with a growing focus on using the right tools for each scenario. 

David Parry-Jones

Chief Revenue Officer

Cheers to another game-changing year ahead!