IT Essentials: The year of the reality check

Because who doesn’t love a year-end review?

2025 has challenged the status quo and forced us all to rethink what we’ve previously accepted as normal.

I began 2025 saying it was time for AI to put up or shut up – that this was the year for the technology to prove its value.

As I noted in our year-in-review webinar, Computing Wrapped, though, 2025 quickly shifted to become the year of the reality check.

It began just two weeks after I posted that editorial, when China’s DeepSeek burst onto the global AI scene and proved that open source is a viable way to train and run AI models.

That was such a huge challenge to the established US approach that it temporarily sent stock markets haywire. Although they recovered quickly, AI-related share price wobbles have come to define the latter half of 2025.

We could probably count Donald Trump’s tariffs, which appear to have been set using calculations from AI, as a related topic.

The hype around AI cooled further over the summer, when an MIT study found that 95% of AI PoCs fail – the first piece of evidence-based research going against the tremendous drive to adopt artificial intelligence at every level of the tech stack.

In cyber, supply chain security came into focus with attacks on M&S, Harrods and Jaguar Land Rover among others, forcing questions about the wisdom of putting your security in the hands of an offshore third party. We expect that model to see some repatriation in 2026.

And talking of repatriation, there’s a growing realisation that embracing the cloud doesn’t always hold water, and might even rain you off. Next year will be less “cloud first” and more “cloud when appropriate,” though it will take time among companies who have already moved major workloads – and there will always be those who decide to press ahead with cloud transformation even if it isn’t 100% suitable, for the sheer simplicity of the fabled “single pane of glass.”

So, 2025 has been a year where reality has bitten. Next year will bring new hype cycles and inflated promises, and when faced with those claims it’s important to remember the lessons learned over the last 12 months.

Thankfully, going into 2026 the future looks – no, wait, Trump’s blockaded Venezuela.

Happy Christmas. Here we go again.

Lest you think I’m ending the year on a bum note, our top stories from this week will give you plenty to think about over the festive period.

Penny Horwood has talked to Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar about AI trust, vibe coding and job displacement. While some of us are AI evangelists and others are AI sceptics, Prashanth says “the pragmatic middle is growing.”

Kerstin Stief, editor of our sister site Computing Deutschland, spoke at length with Patrick Alberts of secure messaging service Element - the commercial arm of the open Matrix project, which could ensure communication across borders is both interoperable and sovereign.

And I talked to Travel Counsellors’ CTO Jon Bauer, as well as delivery manager Victoria Tracey and product delivery lead Jennifer Annely, about the company’s recent hackathon – which had benefits for both productivity and diversity. There are tips on how to replicate that success at your own company, too.

I’ll close my last editorial of 2025 by wishing you all a happy end to the year, wherever you are.