A market map + 25 crisp ideas for an over‑heated, heads‑down year in AI & data:

Anyone who has been near AI this year has felt both: the froth of record funding and the grind of real deployment. Bubbles can be silly; they also finance railroads. 2025 is the year AI shifted from chatbots to systems that actually do work: agents with tools and memory, wired into governed data, powered by reasoning models. That tension—speculation funding infrastructure—frames everything that follows.

Welcome to the 2025 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape, our eleventh edition since 2012 (an almost annual effort, prior editions here). This is the biggest redraw in recent memory. We made the editorial decision to substantially cut the logo count—from a peak of 2,000+ last year to ~1,150—to make the map legible and, frankly, possible amid an explosion of new companies and products. We also gave more space to the hyperscalers and pure-play category leaders (NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, Anthropic etc) to reflect where market share, distribution, and developer gravity sit today.

Structure-wise, we made major edits. We deleted a few sections (notably folding the former “open source” box into the broader map as open weights/OSS now permeate every layer) and added others, for example an explicit agent stack (agent platforms, agents infra/tooling) and local AI (local/on device LLM runtimes). The result is a cleaner flow from data to infra to ML/AI to agents/applications.

As in recent years, the landscape is available both as a:

• PDF (high-res, zoomable) – https://mattturck.com/landscape/mad2025.pdf
• website/interactive version (searchable, with data cards) – mad.firstmark.com

With that, here’s our roundup of the 25 ideas for 2025: what’s breaking through, what’s consolidating, and where the next wave of value is likely to accrue.

CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ANALYSIS

(Thank you: as every year, the MAD landscape is a team effort.  Major thanks to the FirstMark crew – Aman Kabeer (co-author), Leah Levine (logos/logistics), Ben Winn (promotion) and Ryan Sullivan (blog refresh), as well as Paolo Campos (PDF design) and Jonathan Grana (interactive version, which he does as a side/promotional project at Go Fractional)