All Things AI: G2's December Round-Up Indicates a Transformative 2025

AI companies went all guns blazing into December 2024. The new year brings strong signals of transformation as AI, generative AI, and agentic AI get multidimensional.

The G2 Take

We parsed all the AI news, analyzed it using G2 data, and distilled it into the most important things you need to know. Let's dive in.

OpenAI and Google continue to duke it out

While OpenAI had 12 days of launches and announced its ChatGPT Pro plan’s $200 pricing, Google has outperformed OpenAI as Gemini now ranks #1 on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard. Considering multifaceted aspects of community-driven evaluation, it is worth noting that The G2 AI Chatbot Grid shows Gemini & ChatGPT neck and neck, with Gemini being #1 in market presence while ChatGPT is #1 in user satisfaction.

Source: G2 Grid® for AI Chatbots

OpenAI now offers advanced voice mode, multimodal inputs and uploads, data analysis, and image generation to its Pro plan users. 

Google’s Gemini 2.0 brings free AI reasoning, multimodal, and agentic capabilities. Its family of models also offers images, video, and audio outputs — while buckling up its agentic AI capabilities through Project Mariner’s powerful updates that will help users accomplish complex tasks.

Amidst OpenAI’s restructuring following its recent $6.6B funding round, its legal battles, and the ambitions to build an advertising model and agentic AI, will its $200 ChatGPT Pro plan be a wise move? Especially, while its American and Chinese rivals offer their models for free.

As competition heats up, the definition of what makes an AI model “good” is evolving. Low latency, enhanced performance, multimodal support, and sophisticated problem-solving are no longer hallmarks of good AI models — they’re the baseline expectations.

China is developing its models at lower costs and in much shorter durations. Alibaba’s Qwen QVQ open source and DeepSeek-V3 exemplify this trend. It won't be long before software buyers and AI users expect the same efficiency from American AI companies.

This begs a few questions:

• Will AI offerings get expensive as performance requirements rise?
• How will agentic AI providers differentiate themselves in a sea of AI agents? 
• How will AI companies tackle model training costs, data center maintenance, and sustainability in the future?

The power of community-driven content meets AI

AI-powered search, enhanced content discovery, and multi-level querying are increasingly becoming essential to user experience. 

If Google’s AI overviews weren’t disruptive enough, its strategic partner Reddit now uses AI to create cross-Reddit summaries and let users jump into threads much faster with minimal effort.

Pairing community reviews with AI to analyze consumer sentiment and contextual understanding is taking center stage. Community-driven platform Yelp is using its AI LLM to help users derive dining insights through reviews of local businesses. It then helps users find trending restaurants through personalized feeds and AI-stitched videos.

And did we mention how AI is reshaping advertising? Yelp’s AI-powered smart selection is helping advertisers maximize reach and crush advertising goals by automatically selecting, testing, and optimizing an ideal review.

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Synthetic media will transform user experience

World Labs’ 3D AI system, followed by Google’s Genie 2, propels customer experience and media production into a multisensory direction, leaping beyond 2D text-to-image creation.

Meanwhile, the promise of realistic digital manifestations, interactive experiences, and real-time control might bring triggering memories of the short-lived metaverse, where marketers lost thousands of dollars on failed branding initiatives. 

Synthetic media, however, is better positioned and will be able to achieve what the metaverse couldn’t. Imagine not having to worry about tech-heavy projects that rely on a team of coders, platform integration experts, and UI/UX designers for a customer-facing campaign! Marketers will be able to create assets and campaigns that are versatile and platform-agnostic, enabling performance at scale. 

We foresee marketers, animators, and content creators actively using synthetic media to engage audiences and deliver interactive customer experiences in industries like retail, gaming, travel, and education. 

In fact, our latest G2 Winter Reports 2025 shows that synthetic media is the second fastest-growing AI category after e-commerce, with 20 new products added in the last quarter.

Source: G2 Winter Reports 2025

Creative agencies, on the other hand, will need to reposition themselves as an increasing number of AI-driven synthetic media tools available to in-house marketing teams will increase the efficiency of creative workflows. Agencies will either elevate or eliminate their own prominence during this wave of change.

Browsers will no longer just be browsers

Open AI’s advanced voice mode, Gemini Flash’s browser agent capabilities, and Microsoft’s Copilot Vision are redefining expectations of the value users can derive from a browser. Your browser will now be able to see, hear, and interact with you. Expect to soon be able to open a browser, click on the agentic AI plug-in, and prompt it to navigate sites, perform tasks, and follow processes.

Microsoft's Copilot Vision, which aims at a privacy-first Edge browser companion experience, could help users shop online, make choices, and not feel lonely while planning major experiences for themselves.

There is a huge opportunity for retailers and travel brands to maximize their assets, metadata, and branding efforts and ensure visibility not just to humans but also to AI bots. However, they will need to make higher investments in firewalls to safeguard their systems and customers from unwanted bots.

The future of AI in the USA could be dictated by a "czar"

That's right, we’re talking about a new position within the Trump administration.

While the new office members aim to define the fate of America’s tech economy, coin America’s AI positioning as a global leader, and steer away from the influence of big tech on politics, the appointment of David Sacks (Trump’s AI & Crypto Czar) and Elon Musk (Department of Government Efficiency co-lead) paints a picture of contradiction.

David Sacks is a venture investor with ties to Elon Musk and prominent technology figures from their PayPal days. 

Four pitfalls marketing leaders must avoid

1. Overlooking the financial aspects associated with AI adoption, such as training costs, data center maintenance, and sustainability, can lead to inefficient spending and long-term operational challenges.
2. Failing to implement AI-enhanced customer interactions, such as conversational AI search features, could result in lower customer satisfaction and competitive disadvantage.
3. Not developing a plan for asset development to ensure your brand is easily discoverable and uniquely identifiable will lead to lost opportunity costs.
4. Creative agencies and marketing teams that resist testing and adopting multi-modal AI in content creation risk reduced efficiency and innovation, potentially diminishing their market relevance.

Chapter 2025: AI expansion and ethical considerations

AI is fast moving in the direction of being able to reason, see, and engage with humans in human-like conversations, which shows promise for the industry’s progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Multi-region expansion plans and multilingual content will eventually be the norm and not the exception as AI engines get smarter, more seasoned, and more regional.

Projects like Google’s Astra and Microsoft’s Copilot will penetrate and redefine human-machine interaction heading into 2025.

Musk's move to sue OpenAI potentially stems from his personal interest in Grok. This brings us to the burning question: will AI reforms and compliance guidelines be designed purely to benefit and safeguard the masses? Or will they drive Silicon Valley agendas? Will future guidelines affect how AI tech is built and deployed?

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Edited by Supanna Das