AI and Scaling Efficiently for Growth Hold the Most Interest
We predict that 2025 is going to be a year of change, so how are business leaders planning for it? In October and November 2024, we surveyed leaders in our Insight to Action network who represent a range of industries and organization sizes, asking them to identify their top topics of interest for 2025. These top 10 topics will guide our monthly Vistage peer advisory executive workshops.
- One of the top two topics is scaling a business efficiently while maintaining culture and quality, with 60% of leaders choosing this as their most important topic. Since scaling is about growth, it’s evident that growth strategy is on the minds of these leaders, which was the leading topic for 2024.
- The second top topic is artificial intelligence (AI): how to transform business decision making, customer service, operational efficiencies, and technological advancements. AI was also chosen by 60% of leaders as the most important topic. This top ranking for AI represents a significant increase from 23% of leaders in our 2024 research. The high ranking is consistent with the #1 ranking for AI among Google search trends from 2024.
The next group of six second-tier topics are chosen by 40 to 50% of executives as their most important topics for 2025.
- The second-tier group includes two revenue and growth-focused topics, namely marketing: practical vs. theoretical approaches and sales and business development.
- Data analytics, using KPIs to gain competitive advantage is the third second-tier topic. Data analytics are supportive of the top topics of scaling efficiently and AI as well as revenue and growth.
- A fourth popular topic on these leaders’ minds is leadership, how to better lead, inspire and engage the team. This clearly supports the top topic of scaling efficiently while maintaining culture and quality.
- Positioning the company for sale in three to five years is the fifth topic leaders are focusing on, and the sixth and final topic in the second-tier group is personal finances.
Comparing these results with 2024, KPIs are more important, up to 40% in 2025 from 14% in 2024.
Overall, there is more of a growth mindset. Two topics that were in the middle tier of the top 10 in 2024 are not seen in 2025. These two topics from 2024 are managing expenses and budgets and managing recession impact.
There is also less interest in strategy per se, with growth strategy and innovation strategy not present, though there are clearly topics, like scaling, which are intertwined with growth strategy.
Rounding out the top 10 list in the third tier are two additional topics. The first is governance and the second is innovative approaches to employee development, which supplants last year’s topic of hybrid team effectiveness.
The top 10 topics for 2025 are shown below in the chart. There are several ties, resulting in two first place, three third place, etc.
Top Tier
1. Scaling a business efficiently while maintaining culture and quality
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI): How to transform business decision making, customer service, operational efficiencies, and technological advancements
Second Tier
3. Marketing: practical vs. theoretical
3. Leadership: how to better lead, inspire and engage team
3. Positioning your company for sales in 5-10 years focused on valuation increase, due diligence readiness, negotiating the deal, PE involvement
6. Data analytics: using KPIs to gain competitive advantage
6. Sales/business development: more effective hiring and development
6. Personal finances
Third Tier
9. Governance
9. Innovative approaches to employee development
Comparison of the Same Top Topics in Google Trends
For a sense of how these topics perform with the general market, we examined Google Trends for the past 90 days in the United States. We shortened the search terms to make the topics more comparable, as some of them have longer titles than others. With this approach, we found a different lineup of popularity.
Using the top 10 starting set from the leaders, the most popular topics are sales, marketing, data analytics and AI among the general US market. The second-tier popularity topics are leadership, governance and selling the company. Third tier are scaling, employee development and personal finances.
Including the same topics, the ranking for past 90 days in the US is:
- Sales
- AI
- Marketing
- Data Analytics
- Selling Company
- Governance
- Leadership
- Employee Development
- Scaling
- Personal Finances
Looking at worldwide Google searches from 2004 to present, ‘leadership’ emerges as a top focus. The other top-rated topics are similar to the US past 90 days, i.e., sales, AI, marketing, and data analytics. The order is comparable at the second and third-tier levels as well. Leadership is searched more frequently in this data set.
- Leadership
- Sales
- AI
- Marketing
- Data Analytics
- Selling Company
- Governance
- Employee Development
- Scaling
- Personal Finances
Vistage Speakers Help Leaders Gain and Apply Expertise in Top Topic Areas
We are fortunate to have the benefit of Vistage’s well established speaker bureau, along with webinars and bi-annual Vistage Executive Summit meetings, so our Vistage leaders can gain expertise to address these topics.
One of the experts that we’ll be working with in 2025 is Mark Sapienza of Crews & Co for OKRs and scaling. For the past five years, there’s been continual interest among the Los Angeles-area Vistage leaders I work with in using OKRs for scaling, as an alternative to EOS. To be sure, EOS is the most popular within Vistage more broadly.
Vistage speaker Ross Hartmann will address us with a focus on ”Leveraging AI for Executive Success: Practical Applications and Strategies for Transforming Your Business with Artificial Intelligence.”
Moving on to the second-tier topics, we will work with Paul Brahim of Wealth Enhancement Group to understand the key drivers of company value, related to positioning the company for sale. I had the pleasure of attending the Wealth Enhancement Group lunch work session on “Optimize Your Financial Plan for Your Business “ at the Orange County Vistage Executive Summit in September 2024, and found the presentation valuable. Attending their session shed light on a number of strategies, and this led me to investigate 721 exchanges as an alternative to the traditional DSTs.
For practical marketing, it’s our pleasure to work again with Vistage member and speaker Evan Bailyn, CEO of First Page Sage. Our leaders specifically requested Evan to provide an update on SEO strategies with the advent of AI.
We will also work with Vistage member and author Steve Heroux on “The System of Selling: A CEO’s Guide to Driving Sales Success.” I had the pleasure of introducing Steve at a morning workshop for the 2023 Los Angeles Vistage Executive Summit. His topic was “Hiring Top Sales Talent: There’s Got to Be a Better Way.” As hiring and developing sales talent is an ongoing challenge for Vistage companies, I am excited to bring his approach to these leaders.
Later in 2025, we will address the topic of governance with William Hawfield of The Board Group.
This strong lineup of workshop speakers will be further enhanced to address the additional high-priority topics, such as data analytics and inspiring and engaging leadership. We will also have a choice of many additional workshops and speakers at the April 8, 2025, Los Angeles Vistage Executive Summit.
Insight to Action Topics of Interest
In 2024, the Insight to Action team has enjoyed the privilege of working on customer segmentation, new products and innovation and also tracking trends in customer awareness and interest.
We anticipate these areas will continue to be of interest as companies continue a growth mindset.
For more resources, visit our growth strategy resources page, or join us at an upcoming office hours.
