In the fast-evolving world of business and technology, staying ahead requires fresh insights and bold strategies. At a recent Platform Leaders event in London, Benoit Reillier, Launchworks’ CEO, was a keynote presenter on key digital trends trends for 2025. Read on for a summary of Benoit’s keynote.

 

Review of 2024 trends

Last year saw the emergence or continuation of a number of key trends, including how traditional businesses have continued to develop their digital platform capabilities, the rise of B2B platforms and the circular economy, the first year of regulation for platforms in Europe, and the continued development of new technologies, including AI. It is also interesting to see that NVIDIA is now the largest company in the world in terms of market capitalisation on the back of its AI chips, which are powering many of the products and services offered by digital platforms.

 

New 2025 digital platform trends

• Ecosystem Competition
• Digital Twins
• Ultra Personalisation
• Holistic Sustainability
• New Regulations
• Automated Platforms

 

Ecosystem Competition will continue to accelerate

The shift from product competition – which has been the norm until recently – to ecosystem competition will accelerate in 2025. If people used to focus on a limited set of product features in their purchasing decisions, they are now increasingly taking into account the attributes of the ecosystem they are buying from.

This is the case for digital platforms (e.g., the decision to buy a phone is driven by the type of ecosystem you want to join) but also increasingly in other markets (e.g., are the brand attributes of the ecosystem you’re buying from aligned with yours in terms of sustainability, etc.). On the supply side, some firms are realising that to take on global challenges, they need to align themselves with other market participants.

We predict that the development of a strategic vision at the ecosystem level, as well as associated governance principles and the role of platforms for their orchestration, will be a key theme for digital-savvy boards in 2025.

 

Digital twins will become mainstream and give rise to new platforms

Digital twins are defined as “a virtual model of a physical object, system or process that mimics its real-world counterpart.”

Such models have been in use in a range of areas, including for the optimisation of industrial processes, but we predict that 2025 will be an inflection point, with the “birth” of many more digital twins in a range of areas. Models and applications will range from large to small, including:

• Models of the Earth – for climate change simulations or gaming with new apps like Flight Simulator 2024;
• Country-level models – including Agent-Based Models at the household level for economic simulations increasingly used by central banks to assess the impact of interest rates, etc.;
• City-level models – for powering smart cities with traffic planning, energy usage and simulations (useful for understanding how, say, the Olympics may impact your city!);
• Firm-level models – focused on specific processes (supply chain, including work done by DSCH at Digital Catapult) or entire ecosystems (like Uber’s internal digital twin of its market);
• Individual-level models – digital twins of ourselves, for example, for some complex heart surgeries, a digital twin can be constructed and used to test the outcome of a planned procedure.

We believe these virtual models will become increasingly easy to generate and useful across the board.

 

Agents will increasingly enable Ultra Personalisation

The “segment of one” has been a marketer’s dream for many years. Yet Henry Ford famously said that you can have your car in any colour you wanted, as long as it was black! We’ve clearly moved away from these standardised products and are nearing the other end of the choice spectrum, where many products and services are even more unique thanks to AI.

• Firms like Zoe are demonstrating that the technology is here for near-real-time measurement of key vitals, which is leading to dietary/food recommendations based on one’s own blood sugar response, microbiome composition, etc.
• Personal assistants are already widespread, including the billions of users of Alexa, Siri and others. In 2025, these will become both ultra-personal by remembering things about you and much smarter by embedding the latest AI developments.
• Firms will increasingly offer targeted products, like a book just for you with tailoredread.ai, or unique interfaces for interacting with your content in the way you want, such as Google’s excellent NotebookLM. In general, tools will increasingly learn your taste to give you more personalised outputs – for example, Midjourney now learns what you like and adapts its designs.

This will, of course, generate challenges and start to impact the labour market. But it will also be incredibly empowering for many people who will be able to do things that were totally impossible only the year before.

 

Holistic Sustainability stays on the agenda

There will undeniably be lots of challenges around the world in 2025, with wars being waged, tariffs being imposed, and the geopolitical situation in a state of flux. Yet we predict that sustainability discussions will increase and permeate many aspects of digital strategies.

We’ve already seen a shift in 2024, and nearly all the discussions we’re having with our clients, employees and partners now include a sustainability angle. The 5 “Rs” – Reducing, Reusing, Refurbishing, Repairing and Recycling – are top of mind for many firms and their ecosystems. 

Although we’ve seen several breakthrough circular economy platforms like Vinterior or Too Good To Go, there has been a realisation that all our ecosystems will need to be sustainable in the long run. 2025 is poised to be a tipping point in this area.

 

New Regulations are in the pipeline

Existing digital regulations for digital platforms, such as the DMA and the DSA in Europe, will be tested in 2025. In particular, the extent to which existing platforms like Apple are ‘open enough’ will come under scrutiny and may trigger enforcement decisions. Aspects of the risk-focused EU AI Act will become live, and new regulations will be drafted. 

The Draghi report recommends an interesting EU-specific focus, potentially suggesting tougher regulation on international mergers than on mergers between EU firms.  

AI will be another focus area for policymakers, and the risk-based regulatory focus will go much further and seek to address competition, welfare, intellectual property, privacy and more. As a society, we will need to have a debate around the kind of principles we want to underpin our future digital world. For example, making it mandatory for AI “agents” to disclose their identity could prove sensible. That would limit the opportunities for bots on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter/X to pose as humans, in the same way that real people are restricted from impersonating others.. These regulatory developments will start to have tangible effects on the products and services we see available in various geographies, from AI agents on phones to self-driving cars.

 

Automated platforms will start to emerge

Platforms are notoriously “multi-sided,” often with demand and supply sides – for example, drivers and passengers on Uber. The platform connects these sides to enable them to transact. Recent AI developments are increasingly allowing some of these sides to be – at least partially – automated, which may fundamentally change the economics of the platform in some cases.

Uber showed how an efficient platform could grow the market, and now that some cars can literally drive themselves, existing “driver-based platforms” like Uber, Lyft or Bolt will have to compete with “robotaxis” like Wayve, Waymo or Tesla. It’s not just transport; quite a few platforms are being disrupted and seeing one of their sides automated, such as tutoring services like Chegg that have been replaced almost overnight by ChatGPT.

This will require most platforms to revisit their platform strategy to adapt and harness AI in a way that enhances the value provided to their ecosystem.

 

Collective Intelligence for AI

It’s clear that most of the 2025 trends in digital platforms are, in fact, powered by AI.  AI is now part of pretty much every single strategic conversation we have with clients and partners. In fact, just this year, we’ve seen first-hand how important AI is for innovation and productivity, and organisations need to understand, exchange best practices and gain visibility.

Today, we’re announcing a new initiative that we’ll launch next year: Collective Intelligence for AI.This initiative will bring together SMEs, corporates and policymakers to share best practices and help develop sustainable AI capabilities. The Platform Leaders community will be invited to contribute, and we’ll welcome new members from the AI space.

We also predict you’ll be able to read much more on this subject in 2025 because the long-awaited new edition of Platform Strategy is set to be published.

 

Stay tuned in 2025, and please do not hesitate to reach out and get in touch if you’d like to discuss any of these topics with the team at Launchworks & Co.