Like a monster in the third act of a horror movie, a slew of sequels and reboots will rise from the twin ashpiles of COVID and the union strikes as major studios fight to remain culturally relevant. The flood of fresh content will be welcomed, overwhelming and possibly ignored as viewers continue the trend toward shorter forms of entertainment. But Hollywood will lumber on, apparently unkillable, especially as M&A activity cleans up (or covers up) the bottom line of struggling studios and the streamers start finally delivering the detailed customer data their advertisers crave.
The AI transformation will be on the bubble at the beginning of the year (expect lots of thinkpieces fretting about “the limits of scaling” from the chattering class), but will end up renewed for a second season when Agentic AI crashlands on everyone’s smart device and web browser. This will also be the time Your Average Consumer starts actually paying attention to this AI thing, and stops tuning it out as just another unfulfilled Silicon Valley promise.
Against this backdrop, threat activity from nation-states will increase in both breadth (# of attacks) and depth (sophistication of attacks/variety of activity). While I don’t expect The Big Attack on infrastructure to land next year, it’s not hard to imagine a Sony 2.0 – an explicit retaliation by one of the Big Four against a US-owned media enterprise – either for coverage, content, or just old-fashioned coercion. The media supply chain is mostly a federation of rivals, and so far the studios’ attempts to corral them have been incomplete, at best. Expect the weakest links to be exploited for maximum profit.
Meanwhile, in the back half of 2025 expect those AI agents to start doing All Of The Things For You, further complicating the distinction between mobile apps and APIs. When does a streaming service lose relevance (and its ability to capture that all-important customer data)? When it gets replaced by an AI agent that just finds what you want to watch and starts playing it. Tudum, indeed.
By the end of 2025, expect the new concern to be an old one: AI agents calling directly on APIs (or at least appearing to) are eating the world. What do you call a smartphone with only one app? Who polices the boundaries between my phone, my agent, and my data? Why did we spend all this time building things in #@$! Swift??
Next stop (in 2026): semi-autonomous agents… who needs to binge the latest season of Yellowstone when your agent can do that for you?