AI 50 2025: AI Agents Move Beyond Chat
The significant advancements in artificial intelligence have enabled companies to automate tasks and streamline operations. By incorporating intelligent agents and reasoning models, businesses can improve efficiency and productivity. This shift towards automation is reshaping the workforce and changing the nature of work. The AI 50 list highlights the innovative ways in which organizations are leveraging AI technologies to drive growth and innovation. As AI continues to evolve, it is likely to play an increasingly pivotal role in various industries.
The 2025 edition of the AI 50 list shows how companies are using agents and reasoning models to start replacing work previously done by people at scale. Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase in 2025. After years of AI tools mostly answering questions or generating content on command, this year’s innovations are about AI actually getting work done. The 2025 Forbes AI 50 list illustrates this pivotal shift, as startups on it signal a move from AI that merely responds to prompts to one that solves problems and completes entire workflows.
AI Evolving from Tool to Problem Solver
Historically, AI assistants could chat or provide information, but humans still had to act on the output. In 2025, that’s changing. For example, legal AI startup Harvey is showing that its software can do more than just answer legal questions–it can handle entire legal workflows, from document review to predictive analysis of cases. Its platform can draft documents, suggest revisions and even help automate negotiations, case management and client contact—suites of tasks that normally require a team of junior lawyers. This achievement earned Harvey a spot on the Forbes AI 50 list, and it exemplifies AI evolving from a helpful tool to a hands-on problem solver.
Enterprise AI Tools
Many of the standout AI 50 companies are enterprise tools that do on-the-job work. Sierra and Cursor, the only product of startup Anysphere, are emblematic of this new generation of business AI. Sierra automates customer service while vastly improving the experience, opening the way for companies to offer help to their customers at all hours. Cursor, meanwhile, has taken the software developer community by storm. Its technology allows anyone to not only autocomplete lines of code (à la GitHub CoPilot), but also generate entire features and applications simply by asking for it in plain English.
Although we’re not yet at a point where companies are deploying robots en masse, startups focused on robotics have made meaningful strides in the past year as they integrate models built using transformers (the “t” in ChatGPT) with hardware. Robotics featured prominently in Nvidia’s keynote at its recent developer conference, with Jensen Huang claiming, “physical AI for industrial and robotics is a $50 trillion opportunity.”
Consumer-Facing AI Products
So far, everyday consumers have mainly encountered advanced AI via chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude (and newcomers like Grok). With the technology maturing—and people realizing how AI can save them time and money at work—expect a wave of consumer-facing AI products that handle whole tasks on their users’ behalf. For example, Anthropic recently launched Claude Code, making software writing accessible to consumers.
AI in the Workplace and Beyond
This year is a turning point: AI graduated from an answer engine to an action engine in the workplace. The 2025 AI 50 companies proved that AI can be trusted with meaningful workloads and deliver real results, setting the stage for broader adoption. As we head into 2026, expect the enterprise gains to start spilling into everyday life. Challenges like accuracy and security remain, but the momentum is undeniable. In 2025, AI gets real work done.