For the past 24 years, Birnbach Communications has issued our TrendReport, a set of important business, media/journalism, technology, and life science trends for the upcoming year. We develop the TrendReport based on conversations with reporters, industry analysts, and our deep understanding of key sectors. Here’s a link to the first of two of trends articles we published for 2025: “TrendWatch: Five Media Predictions for 2025: AI, the Degraded Quality of Information & More” (Dec. 11, 2024).

Our TrendReport analysis is part of our effort to help clients anticipate and navigate the business environment. We pick trends that directly impact our clients and their customers, as well as broader trends that we expect to dominate media coverage. In our experience, those broader trends are important because clients tend to focus only on their sector and competitors, without realizing that if they want us to pitch national media, we’ll be competing with those macro-level trends for reporters’ attention.

In addition to issuing our TrendReport, each year we issue a TrackReport that evaluates how we did—what we got right and what we missed. A lot of people offer trends and predictions, but the TrackReport is how we hold ourselves accountable, with the goal of enhancing our process for the upcoming year.

So here’s our look at the trends we identified for 2025.

1. AI will be pervasive, spurring innovation and backlash.

We were accurate about the speed of generational improvements and AI’s pervasiveness. We overstated the M&A environment. But we got the backlash part right—like, on LinkedIn and elsewhere, concerns that the use of em-dashes (as in earlier in this sentence) is a sure sign of AI-created content. (Please note: This article—em-dashes and all—has been written entirely by humans but we did use AI to proof the article.)

The term “AI Slop,” referring to low-quality, generic AI-generated content, became a mainstream concept in 2025. As we predicted, we’ve seen deepfakes and higher electricity costs due to the energy demands of AI data centers—but not yet the level of media attention we expected. We haven’t seen much regulatory impact yet, but that may be because the relevant agencies and political bodies have been focused elsewhere and because, as we’ve seen, members of Congress don’t seem to understand technology.

One thing we missed is the number of layoffs attributed to AI, while, at the same time, across several sectors, AI projects have been disruptive but have not yet paid off.

Grade: A-. What’s clear is that organizations must figure out where and how AI provides value and how to handle any backlash, especially involving layoffs.

2. Working with influencers and paid opportunities will become more critical for B2B marketers.

We said that fewer traditional reporters, combined with growing distrust, would be an issue this year, and we were absolutely right. We recommended that B2B marketers consider engaging with influencers, but we didn’t see much of that, and there could be two reasons:

1. We suggested that former trade reporters might be ideal industry influencers, and they may be producing paid content so seamlessly that we didn’t recognize the collaborations.
2. Judging by the influencers who contacted us offering paid collaborations, many were lifestyle influencers—offering DIY, family travel, and home inspiration content, when those topics aren’t relevant to our clients—that it may be that neither creators nor organizations know how to find each other.

Grade: A-. We still think marketers should consider working with influencers because the decline in journalists and media outlets, combined with Gen Z’s preference for trusting influencers over traditional media, is not going away. But attracting more attention means leveraging AI as a search tool to bring your organization’s content to the top of search and discovery results. We will write more about that in our TrendReport for 2026.

3. The quality of information will degrade because there will be so many different versions.

We got this right. You can see how major news is covered by traditional media and across different social media platforms. Traditional media has covered this indirectly, often through surveys showing that young people tend to trust news reported by influencers over traditional media. We haven’t seen much coverage that notes AI search may be as problematic as other search tools, including the tendency to show outdated information.

Grade: A. Fragmentation of the media will continue, and that will continue to have an impact on trust and readership.

4. Social media will continue to fragment.

Millions of users have left X (formerly Twitter) over the past year, many heading to Threads and other social media platforms. That may still be ongoing, but X is not on the ropes; and we have one client who stopped posting on another platform because they get no engagement there. None.

Grade: B-. Organizations should maintain their presence on major platforms but continue experimenting with new ones, as dissatisfaction with current ones is growing.

5. Life science, biotech and healthcare sectors will be in for a bumpy ride.

Overall, we were right. Life sciences and healthcare sectors have had a bumpy ride. Funding has dropped and many firms laid off employees. We overestimated what turned out to be secondary story lines, like shortage of specialist healthcare providers—an issue that still needs to be addressed—and

AI in the drug discovery process. We also failed to anticipate the disruption brought by the change of priorities in the Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA such as cutting cancer research..

Grade: C. We expect the sector to experience further disruption for the next several years.

That’s a look back at our first five trends for 2025. We issued a follow-up list, available here: “Additional Trends for 2025: EVs, Real Estate, Wearable Tech, Movie Theaters & Streaming Services,” and we will evaluate how we did on those predictions in a separate article.

Also, stay tuned for our TrendReport for 2026.