Mary Meeker's new 'AI Trends' report makes the case for optimism

Historically, Mary Meeker‘s “Internet Trends” reports have been legendary. After a five-year hiatus, the VC/analyst has co-authored a remarkable new 340-page trends report on artificial intelligence — and her findings are being discussed in the community.

Most of the report focuses on the here and now, with specific details about what’s driving all the changes. The word “unprecedented” appears on 51 of the report’s 340 pages, TechCrunch pointed out.

But there’s also some moments where it feels like “scenes from the future,” with mind-blowing speculation about where we may be headed next.

For example, the long-awaited arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) “is increasingly being viewed not as a hypothetical endpoint, but as a reachable threshold,” they write at one point. This in turn “would redefine what software (and related hardware) can do,” capable of understanding goals, generating plans and even self-correcting in real time, all “with little to no human oversight.”

That’s just one of a wide variety of perspectives. They even asked ChatGPT 4o what AI would be doing in 10 years, just to see what kind of answer it would ultimately splice together. But together it all tells the story of AI today — and possibly tomorrow — in a beautifully written document created specifically “to map the pace and breadth of AI’s expansion,” along with some very vivid examples demonstrating its potential to transform the world as we know it.

The pace and scope of change related to artificial intelligence is happening materially faster than the Internet Revolution.

Find our latest report, “Trends – Artificial Intelligence” here.

— BOND (@bondcap) May 30, 2025

Intelligence Become Kinetic?

Now a general partner at VC firm BOND, Meeker joined with two other general partners — Jay Simons and Daegwon Chae — along with BOND principal Alexander Krey (previously a growth investor at Kleiner Perkins).

But it’s somewhere after page 300 that their report notes that we’ve already arrived in “an era where intelligence is not just embedded in digital applications, but also in vehicles, machines, and defense systems.” (“As AI moves closer to the edge…” they write later, “the distinction between digital and physical infrastructure continues to blur.”) And it’s not just limited to obvious defense applications like Anduril’s autonomous drones. “Companies like Carbon Robotics are putting AI into the dirt — using computer vision to eliminate weeds without herbicides.”

They also cite the growing sales for AI-driven “halter” collars designed for grazing cattle, to finally give ranchers the power of “virtual fencing.”

It’s like something out of a science fiction novel, as they write of this “broader shift” happening now into “a world where AI turns capital assets into software endpoints. Intelligence, once confined to screens and dashboards, becomes kinetic.” Waymo’s self-driving cars (and Tesla’s own self-driving features) have already become “revenue-generating deployments, logging millions of driverless miles.”

Predicting the Next Frontier

One things for sure — there will be fierce competition. One slide lists the dozens of AI-related product announcements that all happened in just four days in May — from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini.

Looking further ahead, they predict our “frontier” use cases will be “broad and varied.”

• Medical discovery and development (like protein sequencing with synthetically generated protein data)
• Multipurpose robotics
• Autonomous scientific research
• Autonomous finance
• Environment and climate monitoring
• Energy grid management
• Supply chain optimization
• Precision manufacturing

They touch on multimodal AI, and the possibilities for “practical” payoffs in contexts “where visual or auditory information matters as much as words.” (“A field engineer can aim a phone camera at machinery and receive a plain-language fault diagnosis; a clinician can attach an X-ray to a note and get a structured report draft…”)

But that’s just the beginning. “Thanks to the rise in low-cost satellite-driven Internet connectivity/access, the potential for the 2.6 billion (or 32% of the world’s population) that is not online to come online is increasing.” Data from the U.N. and the International Telecommunications Union shows less than half of South Asia is online — and roughly 30% of sub-Saharan Africa. Internet penetration is roughly 75% for East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of browser search bars, their very first online experience could very well be with AI agents — that are speaking in their own language. “Imagine a ‘first experience’ of the internet that doesn’t involve typing a query into a search engine but instead talking to a machine that talks back.”

The impact could be huge, as powerful internet-enabled agents “upend existing tech hierarchies, disintermediating dominant platforms and redistributing value.”

Showing Not Telling

At times the report is oddly poetic — like the dramatic opening of a Charles Dickens novel. “For some, the evolution of AI will create a race to the bottom; for others, it will create a race to the top.”

And a picture is worth a thousand words — like the chart that graphs ever-increasing mentions of “AI” in corporate earnings transcripts.

But the visuals are all in service of their larger point that AI’s impact is real, meaningful and increasingly widespread — a fact that’s clear even from the charts’ increasingly dramatic titles:

• “Rapid Ramp in FDA-Approved AI Medical Devices” (based on figures from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence)
• “30%-80% Reduction in Medical R&D Timelines, per Insilico Medicine & Cradle”

One slide even highlights initiatives at Oxford and Arizona under the heading “Education & Government = Increasingly Announcing AI Integrations.”

Will AI Take White-Collar Jobs?

By the end of the report, they’re ready tackle the biggest question of all: Will AI agents replace human workers in white-collar jobs? “Although possible, history and pattern recognition suggest the role of humans is enduring and compelling.”

They note what’s been said before — that history’s big technological advances “have typically driven productivity and efficiency gains,” all while also creating “more — but new — jobs.”

There’s even a comforting graph of nearly 80 years worth of figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, demonstrating that increases in “labor productivity” seems to coincide with increases in non-farm employment levels.

“That said, this time it’s happening faster.”

They even offer some predictions on what that will look like. “In an extreme, entirely agentic future, humans maintain a role in the system, pivoting towards oversight, guidance, and training. Imagine facilities filled with humans teaching robots intricate movements or offices full of workers providing reinforcement learning human feedback to optimize algorithms.

“This is not conjecture. Companies like Physical Intelligence and Scale AI, respectively, are building powerful businesses based on this view of the world. … Technology has constantly redefined and evolved the nature of work and productivity … AI is no different.”

The Case for Optimism

They underscore the point with a notable quote just last month from NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang — that every job will be affected by AI — some lost, some created.

And while you’re not going to lose your job to an AI, “you’re going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI.”

If the report feels like a novel, it also seems to culminate with an inspiring message. “As investors, we always assume everything can go wrong, but the exciting part is the consideration of what can go right. Time and time again, the case for optimism is one of the best bets one can make.”

So even with geopolitical tensions rising, “One thing is certain,” the report concludes in its final sentence. “It’s gametime for AI, and it’s only getting more intense…

“And the genie is not going back in the bottle.”