Benedict Evans’ 2025 AI Deck — What It Actually Means for Enterprises
AI won’t replace your company. It will remove steps between the 4–500 apps you already use.
Published
November 25, 2025
New Platforms, Fewer Steps
New Platforms, Fewer Steps
Mainframes → PCs → SaaS exploded the number of apps. AI flips the question from “what new app do we build?” to “what step can we remove?”
For enterprises, that means:
Treat LLMs as cross-app operators
Read → reason → validate → write → log, across tools.Aim at swivel-chair work
Any task that forces humans to copy/paste between CRM, ITSM, ERP, email, spreadsheets.Own the interface, swap the brains
Keep models interchangeable behind one orchestration layer you control.Make knowledge a versioned asset
Version your corpora, scope retrieval tightly, and require the system to either cite its sources or refuse.The “new platform” isn’t a chatbot. It’s a thin intelligence layer across your existing estate.
Invest Now (Even If You “Pre-Build”)
Invest Now (Even If You “Pre-Build”)
Evans’ implicit warning to large companies: waiting is also a strategy—just usually a bad one.
How to read this as a corporate policy:
Waiting taxes you twice
You lose automation gains now and arrive late to the learning curve (guardrails, metrics, playbooks).Early investment pre-builds capability
Even if you expect another model wave in 12–24 months, you’re banking:Real usage data and error patterns
Evaluation suites and safety rails
Internal talent that understands how to ship AI safely
Fund AI like strategy, not as a demo budget Treat AI as a multi-year capability bet (like CRM or cloud), not a stack of pilots chasing headlines.
Why Usage Still Lags
From Experiments to Daily Work
What to Build in 90 Days
What to Build in 90 Days
You don’t need a “five-year AI vision deck.” You need one credible 90-day plan.
Weeks 1–2: Choose and baseline
Pick one revenue surface and one cost surface with:
Repeatable work
Clear definition of “done”
Strong ground truth (systems of record)
Baseline:
Minutes per task
Error cost
Backlog and SLA performance
Weeks 3–6: Ship the skinny version
Constrain sources aggressively; add validators before anything touches core systems.
Roll to 10–50 real users.
Capture human edits as training and evaluation signals.
Weeks 7–10: Stabilize and prove ROI
Cut variance; tighten retrieval scopes; cap context window size.
Cache frequent queries.
Share weekly cycle-time, accuracy, and error reductions with leadership.
Weeks 11–13: Productize
Replace chat with one-click actions inside existing tools (ticket sidebar, CRM panel, email plug-in).
Add admin controls for scopes, thresholds, approvals, and audits.
Run your first controlled model upgrade and document the impact end-to-end.
The Takeaway
The Takeaway
Evans’ decks are a pattern: he shows that platforms win by changing how work gets done, not by adding more screens.
Translate that to AI:
LLMs are workflow compressors, not another department.
Use them to remove steps across your SaaS estate—not to create a new island.
Measure behavior change and business outcomes, not tokens.
Quietly stack “boring” advantages: scoped knowledge, evals, guardrails, and model optionality.
The companies that start now won’t just have better tooling in three years. They’ll have better workflows, cleaner data, and an organisation that already knows how to ship AI safely—while everyone else is still rewriting their first pilot.
References
https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations