You could feel it in the room this year. Not in a vague “the vibe shifted” way. In the practical, stressful way that shows up when a team stares at a dashboard and sees the old formulas stop working. The leads look different. The traffic behaves worse. The buyer asks sharper questions. The sales cycle drags. The budget gets tighter. And the person in charge of growth has to explain, with a straight face, why “more content” is not a strategy and “we’ll figure it out” is not a plan.

That is what 2025 felt like.

AI did not just add tools. It changed discovery. Search kept drifting toward answers instead of clicks. Attention got thinner and more brittle. Customers grew more cautious, then more impatient. Meanwhile, inside companies, the same killers stayed busy: shifting priorities, fuzzy ownership, missed deadlines, and leaders who want the comfort of “great culture” without the discomfort of real standards.

So the theme I kept coming back to on Transmyt was not a tactic. It was a choice.

Build an operating system for growth that earns trust, or keep collecting half-finished campaigns like souvenirs.

This recap walks …