2025 will not be remembered as a year of breakthroughs, but as a year of realisation.
Across the conversations that unfolded throughout our 2025 portfolio, spanning design studios, planning teams, supply networks, retail floors, and technology partners, one truth kept resurfacing, often uncomfortably.
The industry no longer lacks tools, ideas, or ambition. It lacks coherence.
AI matured. 3D expanded. Digital workflows proliferated. Yet many organisations felt less confident, not more. Decisions were made faster, but trusted less. Pilots multiplied, yet progress felt fragile.
What emerged wasn’t a story about technology failing. It was a story about systems straining under misalignment.
This is not a recap of what happened in 2025. It is a synthesis of what the industry collectively shared and learned, and what it must now confront to move forward with intent in 2026.
Plan
The year forecasting became a confidence problem, not a maths problem
Planning quietly moved to the centre of every serious conversation in 2025. Not because it suddenly became more sophisticated, but because its weaknesses became impossible to ignore.
Strategically, leadership teams are asking planning to do more than ever. Absorb volatility. Enable agility. Guide investment. Reduce risk in an increasingly unpredictable world. AI is being pulled into this moment as both promise and pressure, expected to stabilise decision making under uncertainty.
Operationally, planners described a very different reality.
Forecasts are only as good as the assumptions behind them, and in 2025 those assumptions kept shifting. Demand signals were distorted by promotion cycles and platform behaviour. Data was fragmented across systems. Late changes rippled downstream with little visibility into consequence.
AI didn’t fix this. In many cases, it exposed it.
Rather than creating confidence, models highlighted how inconsistent inputs, misaligned incentives, and unclear ownership undermine trust. Scenario planning became common, but often brittle. Useful in theory, but difficult to operationalise when governance, accountability, and decision rights were unclear.
The deeper insight from 2025 wasn’t that planning tools are inadequate. It was that planning maturity is uneven.
Until organisations align around shared definitions, shared data truth, and shared accountability for decisions, not just outcomes, planning will remain a pressure point rather than a stabiliser.
And when planning wobbles, everything downstream feels it.
Design
The year we moved from expression to responsibility, from sketches to systems
Design conversations in 2025 were less romantic than before and far more consequential.
Strategically, design is being asked to do more than create product. It is being asked to create meaning, differentiation, and coherence in a world where generative tools can produce infinite variation in seconds. AI didn’t threaten designers’ relevance. It did, however, challenge their judgement.
Operationally, this pressure showed up as overload. Too many options. Too little clarity. Faster cycles without firmer decisions.
This is where Digital Product Creation (DPC) and 3D firmly belong. Not as downstream execution tools, but as design infrastructure.
In 2025, 3D was no longer about nice visuals; it became the interface where creative intent, technical feasibility, and commercial constraints collide. When it worked, it accelerated alignment. When it didn’t, it amplified distrust.
And trust emerged as the defining issue. Trust in digital silhouettes. Trust in virtual materials. Trust in colour accuracy. Trust that what teams saw on screen meant something physically.
Colour, in particular, surfaced repeatedly as a credibility breaker. Not a technical edge case, but a reason teams disengage from digital workflows altogether when outputs don’t match reality.
At the same time, computational design and AI blurred the line between creativity and systems thinking. The most compelling design discussions weren’t about form for form’s sake, but about using digital tools to explore constraints such as fit, performance, materials, waste, and inclusivity.
Design literacy - understanding downstream impact, manufacturing logic, and data behaviour - became as important as aesthetic skill.
2025 saw design shift from designing objects to designing decisions. From expression to responsibility.
Make
The year we agreed tools aren’t the problem. Maturity is.
If Design was about deciding, Make was about proving those decisions could survive reality.
Strategically, organisations want scale. Faster development, fewer samples, better collaboration, and lower costs. DPC is often positioned as the answer.
Operationally, teams described something more fragile.
The challenge wasn’t whether tools worked, but whether workflows held together once they left individual hands. Too many processes still depend on informal knowledge, hero users, and brittle handoffs between systems.
Asset libraries exist, but governance is inconsistent. Standards and skills exist, but adoption and support remain uneven.
Additive manufacturing and advanced fabrication generated excitement, but again the constraint wasn’t the technology. It was qualification, repeatability, cost logic, and how new methods fit into existing approval systems.
Physical validation still wins arguments, and rightly so. But when digital outputs can’t reliably predict physical outcomes, confidence collapses and teams revert to old habits.
The real Make-level insight from 2025 was that digital maturity isn’t about installing tools at all. It’s about reducing fragility with fewer handoffs, clearer ownership, shared standards, and workflows that don’t fall apart under pressure.
Supply
The year resilience mattered more than theatre and dashboards
Supply conversations in 2025 were grounded, pragmatic, and often sceptical.
Strategically, resilience became the headline goal: diversification, localisation, transparency, risk mitigation. But beneath the language, a more basic concern dominated: can we trust the system we’re managing?
Operationally, many teams still can’t.
Visibility has improved, but visibility alone doesn’t change behaviour. Transparency without incentives, enforcement, or decision authority becomes theatre; impressive on screen, inert in practice.
Localisation surfaced as a nuanced topic, not a silver bullet. Nearshoring reduced some risks while introducing others. The future isn’t global vs local. It is smarter network design with clearer trade-offs.
Data integrity again emerged as a bottleneck because when upstream plans shift late or assumptions aren’t shared, supply networks absorb the shock, and often without the authority to challenge it.
The 2025 supply insight was sobering but clear: resilience is more than just a dashboard problem. It’s a governance problem.
Sell
The year loyalty fractured because differentiation did
Retail and commercial conversations in 2025 weren’t obsessed with channels, but with meaning.
Strategically, brands talk about experience, personalisation, and loyalty. Operationally, teams struggle with fragmentation: disconnected systems, siloed data, and inconsistent execution across touchpoints.
AI entered retail pragmatically. The most credible use cases weren’t grand “journey transformations,” but focused applications: service augmentation, search, content efficiency, operational support.
Social platforms accelerated discovery, but also fatigue. When everyone uses the same tools, differentiation collapses faster.
Physical retail remained relevant, but no longer as an inventory container. Stores justified themselves through service, expertise, emotion, and community, all of which depend more on people than platforms.
The uncomfortable truth from 2025: you can’t loyalty-programme your way out of sameness. It is coherence, across brand, product, service, and story, that is the real competitive advantage.
The Signals That Cut Across the Entire Value Chain
Across Plan, Design, Make, Supply and Sell, the same signals appeared again and again:
- Alignment is the real bottleneck, not technology
- Data integrity is foundational, not technical debt
- Change management is still underestimated and keeps killing good initiatives
- Craft is returning as strategy, not nostalgia
- AI is moving from “wow” to “where exactly?”
These weren’t isolated observations, but systemic patterns.
Moving Forward
If 2025 was a year of realisation, 2026 will reward discipline.
Not bigger visions but tighter loops. Not more pilots but repeatability. Not more tools but clearer decisions.
Moving forward requires:
- Planning that builds confidence, not noise
- Design systems that earn trust, not just generate output
- Workflows that reduce fragility
- Supply networks governed for action, not optics
- Retail experiences built on coherence, not gimmicks
The industry has already said what needs fixing, repeated across a year of conversations in different rooms, regions and different words.
The question now isn’t whether the future is clear, but whether organisations are willing to act on what they already know.
PI returns in 2026 with an exciting line-up of events, online discussions, community gatherings and more. Find out more here.
