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- AI in 2025: What the Top 30 Experts Are Saying About Our Futuređź’° BA Startups Collectively Secured $7.2B in May
AI in 2025: What the Top 30 Experts Are Saying About Our Futuređź’° BA Startups Collectively Secured $7.2B in May
Here at Ignite, we often dive deep into the infrastructure side of AI, but what’s really happening in the broader, more holistic view as we reach mid-2025? The team at Section gathered insights from over 30 leading AI experts spanning academia, enterprise, research, and policy. Their key message: AI isn’t just a tech revolution—it’s reshaping society, redefining work, and challenging leadership.
We’ve distilled this fantastic piece into seven major takeaways, each backed by powerful quotes and hard-earned wisdom. Think of it as the wisdom of the AI crowd.
1. Move Fast—But With Strategic Intent
Speed is vital, but alignment is just as crucial. AI initiatives without clear purpose or governance risk stalling, or worse, causing harm. AI deployment isn’t about throwing Copilot licenses at the org, it’s about tightly coupling business needs, technical feasibility, and frontline operations.
"The transitions are going to be painful, no question. But we handle them poorly when we don't embrace the tools and get ahead of the curve. It's not about eliminating the bad futures but steering towards the quality futures."
2. Jobs Are Becoming Tasks, And That’s a Cultural Shift
AI is breaking down roles into discrete tasks. Success favors those who adapt quickly and creatively harness these new tools.
“Think of jobs as bundles of tasks and identify which of those tasks can be automated while others require human expertise.”
“If you're in marketing today, get proficient with ChatGPT, Midjourney, and one data tool—you’re already ahead of 80-90%.”
3. Ethics Isn’t Binary—It’s About Values and Tradeoffs
The debate isn’t ethical vs. unethical AI; it’s about whose values are encoded, and who benefits.
“There aren’t ethical vs unethical systems. There are different values prioritized in different systems.”
“If we build tools that don’t work as well in Spanish as English, that’s structural inequality baked into code.”
4. Big Tech Now Operates Like Nation-States
Experts warn that AI power is concentrated to the point where corporations resemble geopolitical entities.
“Corporations are functioning more and more like states. They’ve acquired the most talented people in every division imaginable.”
5. Regulation Must Catch Up—Because Industry Won’t Self-Police
Without clear legal frameworks and accountability, we risk monopolies and blind spots becoming entrenched.
“We need legislation where AIs are tied to human-backed legal entities—so someone’s accountable.”
6. AI’s Real Value Comes From Rethinking Workflow, Not Just Adding Tools
AI is not merely a feature to tack on, it’s an opportunity to rethink how value is created from the ground up.
“Too many AI pilots get stuck because they’re solving the wrong problem.”
“The real ROI isn’t automating 10 tasks—it’s rethinking how the work should be done from first principles.”
7. Change Management Is the Real Bottleneck
The biggest challenge isn’t technology—it’s people. Internal champions and behavior change drive success.
“Buying treadmills doesn’t reduce heart disease. You need behavioral change. Same with AI.”
Groom your gurus. Promote the internal champions. They’re your change agents.”
If you’re a leader, the smartest move isn’t to wait. Encourage your team to engage with AI deliberately and consistently. Be curious, experiment, and iterate. AI transformation isn’t just a project, it’s a daily business imperative.
//Whats Next
Bay Area Startups Collectively Secured $7.2B
$7.2B went to Bay Area startups in May, with a flurry of funding activity at the end of the month Vertical and horizontal AI companies (Grammarly, $1B) received the bulk of the fundings this week, followed by biotech (Neuralink, $600M) and medical devices (Exo, $100M).
M&A: There was a steady flow of acquisitions in May. The ten with disclosed amounts had a total transaction value of $26.8B, more than 8x the $3.1B total in May of last year. Another forty acquisitions with undisclosed amounts brought the number of acquisitions for the month to 51, more than double the 26 from May 2024.
Fast forward to IPOs: Last week's Hinge Health IPO was followed today by Omada Health and coming up next is Chime as they finish their roadshow. Omada priced shares at $19 and opened at $23, raising almost $1.1B in their IPO, making them the first tech company among recent IPOs not to have a down-round IPO. Their last valuation was $1.1B in their $192M Series E funding in 2022. And then...[not an SV company, but IPO of interest) Circle's IPO exploded, they priced above their original range, came out at $31 and ended up closing at the end of the day at $83.23, a 168% surge. Chime's IPO next week will be the next touchpoint for the return of the IPO market.
Follow us on LinkedIn to stay on top of what's happening in 2025 in startup fundings, M&A and IPOs, VC fundraising plus new executive hires & investor moves.
Early Stage:
Obvio closed a $22M Series A, improves traffic safety by providing AI-powered traffic cameras.
Shenandoah Therapeutics closed a $21.5M Seed, dedicated to developing and refining TCIPs, which are designed to manipulate cell-signaling pathways and induce cancer cell death
Ciroos closed a $21M Seed, offers an AI SRE teammate that empowers site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps and operations teams to be superheroes.
Impart Security closed a $12M Series A, delivers the world's first AI security platform trusted to operate autonomously in production environments.
Archil closed a $6.7M Seed, Archil's infinite, shareable volume storage provides instant access to massive data sets in S3
Growth Stage:
Saildrone closed a $60M Series C, creating a paradigm shift in how navies, law enforcement, civil government, and commercial organizations obtain the real-time, accurate data required to monitor and protect our oceans.
Allay Therapeutics closed a $57.5M Series D, pioneering ultra-sustained analgesic products to transform post-surgical pain management and recuperation for patients and physicians.
Antheia closed a $56M Series C, the next-generation pharmaceutical ingredient producer with a mission to end drug shortages.
Voxel Safety closed a $44M Series B, revolutionizing workplace safety with its AI-powered site visibility platform, designed to help organizations identify and mitigate risks in industrial environments.
Deep Sentinel closed a $15M Series B, revolutionizing physical security for businesses and homes as the only system that stops crime before it happens.
Follow us on LinkedIn to stay on top of what's happening in 2025 in startup fundings, M&A and IPOs, VC fundraising plus new executive hires & investor moves.
“The power draw is only half the story.”
Chris Sosa, Director of Energy & Infrastructure, AMD
At our AI INFRA SUMMIT, Chris Sosa delivered a powerful reminder: the future of AI deployment won’t be won by raw compute alone. It’ll be won by efficiency—measured in every watt, every square foot, and every architectural decision from silicon to system.
Density-Driven Design: How AMD is engineering chips to meet rising AI demand without blowing through thermal or spatial limits.
Performance per Watt Economics: Sosa framed energy efficiency not as a trade-off, but as a competitive advantage in infrastructure planning.
Modularity & ROCm Innovation: Reinforcing the importance of an open software stack in accelerating AI workloads across varied deployments.
Deployment Flexibility: From hyperscale to edge, he outlined how AMD is building infrastructure that adapts—not just scales.
Sosa’s session challenged infra leaders to rethink their metrics—and left no doubt that silicon strategy is now infrastructure strategy.
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Head of Content // Team Ignite
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