As AI moved deeper into the core of business throughout 2025, the conversation surrounding the technology shifted dramatically. Less attention was paid to novelty and model benchmarks, and more to the underlying forces shaping AI’s value – infrastructure constraints, human judgement, and economic measurement, to name a few.

To close out the year, we asked Columbia Business School faculty to distill the single word or phrase that best captures the reality of AI in business. Their answers form a snapshot of how scholars across disciplines are interpreting AI’s evolving role in the economy, and what business leaders should be paying closest attention to as the technology continues to mature.

This article is part of a series in which CBS faculty reflect on the past year in AI.

CBS: When CoreWeave's Michael Intrator spoke at CBS in September, he said the single most important trend right now is "inference" — the monetization of AI. What do you think is the single most important word when it comes to AI and business in 2025?

“Energy” is the key AI business word of 2025. This year saw the dawning of a widely-shared realization that access to cheap, abundant, and reliable energy will be a defining advantage in the competition for AI leadership. This insight makes it clear that the White House’s decision to cut funding for U.S. renewable energy projects is a shot in the foot of American AI ambitions.

  • Brett House, Professor of Professional Practice in the Economics Division

I would say it's "reasoning", which has been a big theme in AI milestones achieved in 2025. Nowadays, not only can AI's reason about business decision-making, the way they can express their chain-of-thoughts also makes them a better aide to human decision-makers in the loop.

  • Will Ma, Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division

From a progress point of view, it is “embeddedness.” I look forward to AI being better embedded in the daily tools we use rather than going to AI tools in order to interact with AI.

  • Oded Netzer, Vice Dean of Research and Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business in the Marketing Division 

My word is “specialization.” AI can do a vast array of things for us. The key is to choose the drivers that will make the biggest difference to our performance. The main question to ask is an outside-in one: What are our 3 or 4 most important strategic priorities and how can we harness AI to achieve these few priorities in the strongest and quickest way?

  • Willie Pietersen, Professor of Professional Practice in the Management Division

The word—or term—of the year is Agentic AI.

  • Olivier Toubia, Glaubinger Professor of Business in the Marketing Division

The word of the year is “data barter.” It describes the pervasive but largely invisible exchange in which consumers provide data that lowers the monetary prices of the goods and services they buy. This concept draws from my forthcoming paper, “A Model of the Data Economy,” which shows that every transaction embeds a data component, and that firms strategically discount prices because the customer data generated during consumption has future value. In other words, firms should charge slightly less for every product, because valuable data accompanies every sale. Your data is part of the price you pay, every time you shop, stream, search, transact, or consume.

Even more striking, this dynamic leads to substantial GDP mis-measurement. Because discounts funded by data are not recorded as monetary value, the official statistics miss a significant amount of sales and investment value. We estimate that the U.S. GDP should have been 3–6% higher annually from 2003 to 2018 once these data-based price adjustments are accounted for. 

  • Laura Veldkamp, Leon G. Cooperman Professor of Finance & Economics in the Finance Division

The phrase I would use to describe AI in 2025 would be “strategic integration.” As AI adoption becomes increasingly widespread, simply having the tools is not enough to carve out a competitive advantage. It will become increasingly important for managers to define their strategic advantage and integrate AI in a way that allows them to take that advantage to the next level. AI itself is unlikely to be the advantage alone

  • Nataliya Wright, Assistant Professor of Business in the Management Division