While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI.

While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category.

Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask.

TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They told us what they anticipate regarding enterprise budgets, trends worth following, and what it will take to raise a Series A in 2025, among other things. Here’s what they said.

What enterprise-related trends will you be paying attention to the most in 2025?

SC Moatti, managing partner, Mighty Capital: I’m really looking into this theme — AI adoption hinges on better data. As enterprises transition from AI experiments to large-scale deployment, the demand for high-quality data intensifies.

Aaron Jacobson, partner, NEA: Code agents for app development modernization are underhyped. Expect to see AI being used to re-platform mainframe apps to the cloud and upgrade older codebases.

Molly Alter, partner, Northzone: A key focus of mine is on spaces that were historically untouchable by venture funds because their business models demanded high COGS or OpEx. We’re seeing AI automate so much behind-the-scenes work that sectors like accounting services, or revenue cycle management, or white-glove legal services can now command software-like margins.

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Marell Evans, founder and general partner, Exceptional Capital: Understanding trends in enterprise sales cycles — what is the duration certain organizations are trialing tools for before making decisions about internal adoption? In addition, understanding the different pricing models of AI [in relation to] traditional SaaS, consumption-based and/or outcome-based.

Mike Hayes, managing director, Insight Partners: An unappreciated metric and something that I think will gain traction in 2025 is TTFV, or time-to-first-value.