25 for ’25: The App Renaissance Arrives

The velocity of app development in the AI era gives us at Redpoint a profound excitement and optimism for the future.

AI is fueling a software renaissance. This is particularly true in historically overlooked markets, where audacious founders are now empowered to address long-standing challenges across industries, sectors, regulatory environments, and geographies.

The forward momentum in AI has sparked new efficiencies in cloud infrastructure, machine learning, and the reduction of computational cost. We believe these technology tailwinds will only continue to compound.

Even though we strongly suspect the advancements of today will look trivial in a few years’ time, we fundamentally believe that the enduring companies of the future are being built today.

To prepare for this rapidly approaching future, we as a team have developed 25 themes we’re exploring across AI applications, in 2025 and beyond:

Customer Relationships & GTM

• Voice will be a preferred AI interface. From customer support to ordering DoorDash, as AI models gain intelligence, we will communicate with them in more human ways. (Patrick Chase)
• Smart CRMs do the heavy lifting, automating intelligent tasks like prospecting, deal processing, and closing. By analyzing customer data and interactions, they recommend actions, allowing sales, marketing, and support teams to zero in on strategic growth and customer success. (Alex Bard)
• (Most) customer support reps log off. The majority of customer support inquiries will be handled by AI, leading to a decline in headcount. This will lead existing vendors to move to outcome based pricing in order to capture the additional value they are creating with AI. (Patrick Chase)
• The creative playbook will be rewritten. Ad agencies will decline in number as generative AI replaces a meaningful percentage of creative roles and processes, while also handling systematic ad buying and management. (Annie Kadavy)
• IT service will be rebooted. IT service management will be reinvented with LLMs. New systems will be built from the ground up to allow AI agents to do the work of resetting passwords, granting access, and processing IT requests with minimal human intervention. (Patrick Chase)
• Account research will be done by AI. Agents that can quickly scrape, organize, and structure unstructured data will save businesses thousands of hours a year. This will allow SDRs to focus on selling conversations versus research and outreach. (Patrick Chase)

Expansion Across Legacy Industries

• Voice AI will pick up the phone. Voice tech will have a transformative effect on call operations in legacy industries, particularly in insurance and healthcare across revenue collection, patient scheduling, plan enrollment and explanations, and clinical trial data collection. (Jordan Segall)
• Procurement becomes productized. Across manufacturing procurement, AI will streamline supplier selection, optimizing inventory with predictive analytics, and enhancing management through dynamic pricing and real-time insights. (Meera Clark)
• Build a platform—or get eaten by one. AI tools for data entry and document processing are great wedges, but the real winners will be those that can evolve into full-fledged platforms. Slow-moving incumbents in legacy sectors like logistics, insurance, and legal are especially ripe for disruption. (Urvashi Barooah)
• Defense tech is all in. The DoD will continue to increasingly turn to innovative startup technologies in the areas of AI, robotics, and cybersecurity as a result of efforts such as the DIU and the success of companies like Anduril, Palantir, and Vannevar. (Jordan Segall)

Back Office Automation

• The verticalization of FP&A is upon us as approaches tailored to each sector’s unique data requirements and terminology gain popularity, especially in industries that have traditionally lacked strong data visibility. (Meera Clark)
• Lower level accounting and finance tasks will disappear faster than most executives expect. When CFOs see savings in their own teams’ basic functions, like journal entries, reconciliation, reporting, budgeting, they will become champions of AI adoption within their companies, looking to drive further efficiencies in the business.  (Erica Brescia)
• The 10 minute tax return. With more CPAs retiring and fewer graduates entering the field, AI is stepping in to fill the gap. As routine tasks disappear, the profession will shift toward strategic advisory, redefining what it means to be an accountant in the next decade. (Urvashi Barooah)
• The automation of healthcare administration has arrived. Streamlining tasks like scheduling, billing, and claims processing while leveraging real-time analytics will allow for optimized resource management, patient flows, and operational efficiency. (Meera Clark)

Prosumer & SMB SaaS

• The one-person $1 billion company is coming. The number of solopreneurs building physical products will explode as the tools to design, manufacture and sell are made increasingly simple with AI. (Annie Kadavy)
• Virtual back office. AI will enable small businesses to automate time-consuming tasks like HR, finance, and banking, freeing owners to focus on growth and innovation. (Alex Bard)
• To immersive interactions, infinite canvases … and beyond! As the utility of AI productivity apps expands from search, discovery, and retrieval to autonomous actions and 2-way communication, our interactions will evolve beyond linear chat-based interfaces to more creative and human-like interactions. (Meera Clark)
• Virtual assistants with superpowers. Each of us will have a “train your own” AI who knows our preferences, our knowledge and our past experiences. We will be able to permission these agents to retrieve and share data for us, in our native tongues. (Annie Kadavy)

Design, Development & Robotics

• AI coding will move beyond smart autocomplete to codebase-wide changes, all orchestrated by LLMs. Software engineers will collaborate with LLMs as if they were an additional engineer on the team. (Patrick Chase)
• The democratization of 3D design. By simulating and testing concepts digitally, designers and engineers will be able to explore performance, safety, and functionality constraints without physical prototypes, gaining time and lowering resource requirements and risks. (Meera Clark)
• The age of robotics is near. As a result of significant enough improvements to video models, reasoning capabilities, ME approaches, and reduced hardware costs, we will see a significant number of startups able to deploy robots more effectively and in varied environments and use cases. (Jordan Segall)
• Creators will harness AI. Pervasive AI will increase the value of human input and expertise. For the first time there will be more opportunities to monetize expertise for individuals and creators. (Annie Kadavy)

Safety, Security & Compliance

• Deepfakes will become an increasingly large problem in the age of AI. New tools will emerge to help us separate the truth from the AI-generated content we will be bombarded with. (Erica Brescia)
• Physical surveillance costs will plummet thanks to Video AI. With responsive, accurate AI-enabled cameras enhancing observation, public spaces will become safer, reducing reliance on police and lowering public security costs. (Annie Kadavy)
• Compliance will be streamlined. In an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, AI agents will rapidly identify compliance risks and reduce compliance timelines across contracts, marketing collateral, and more, bringing efficiency to organizations of all sizes. (Jordan Segall)
  

Redpoint has been fortunate to partner with AI category leaders ranging from Mistral, Modal, Poolside, and LiveKit across AI enablement to Attio, Abridge, Leya, and Trunk Tools across AI applications. More will be announced – we’re just getting started.

The next generation of apps, with AI as a built-in, rather than a sidecar, will unlock numerous efficiencies across the application universe in 2025. Agree? We’d love to hear from you. Follow us on Twitter or find us on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.