AI is moving faster than trust: what Mary Meeker missed
Mary Meeker’s latest AI megadeck is a masterpiece of charts and confidence. It’s all about technology and there’s nothing on societal or cultural concerns. The real insight lies in the questions that it doesn’t ask.
Mary Meeker’s name carries weight. Her annual tech trend decks have become cultural events in Silicon Valley. They set the tone for investors and inspire founders. They also overwhelm social feeds with slide after slide of everything seemingly going up and to the right. (Meeker’s charts always trend upward and to the right, never downward and to the left).
The May 2025 edition, Trends – Artificial Intelligence, does not disappoint. It’s a masterclass in momentum: a 300+ slide juggernaut of exponential curves, cross-sector case studies and headline-friendly stats. It’s also a one-sided narrative that positions AI as the next inevitable hype cycle, with barely a footnote on human consequences.
In short, it’s exhausting. You’ll need an AI to cut it down to size.
This isn’t just about tech. It’s about trust
Meeker’s deck asks us to marvel at Al. And to be fair, the numbers are strong.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in under three years. The six largest US tech firms collectively spent $212 billion on capital expenditures (CapEx) in 2024, with a significant portion of this amount driven by investments in AI. Developers in NVIDIA’s ecosystem have grown six times in seven years. And compute power is compounding at rates that make Moore’s Law look sluggish.
But charts alone don’t make a strategy. And here’s the thing: what this report largely sidesteps is the issue that keeps communicators up at night.
It doesn’t interrogate public scepticism. It doesn’t address the tension between AI-generated content and organisational voice. It barely touches on the societal and cultural issues of ethics, governance, misinformation, bias, attribution or stakeholder backlash.
In other words, it tells us what’s happening from a technology perspective, not how to lead through it.
What communicators should take from Meeker’s deck
Communicators need to read between the lines.
AI’s global rollout is simultaneous
Unlike the original web, which diffused over decades, AI tools such as ChatGPT landed on the world stage all at once. That creates enormous complexity for multinationals. Stakeholder expectations, ethical norms and platform regulation vary wildly across regions, but audiences expect consistent behaviour. The communications strategy needs to be global.
Developers have become storytellers
The growth of AI developer ecosystems (with seven million users using Google’s Gemini alone) isn’t just a tech statistic. These communities shape how AI behaves, what it says, and what content it produces. That means communicators aren’t just managing media relations anymore. We’re negotiating with the developers of tomorrow’s conversation platforms.
AI is already passing as human
A March 2025 study cited by Meeker’s team found that 73% of people mistook AI-generated responses for those of humans. This is now a present-day reputational risk. If your communications playbook doesn’t address transparency for AI-generated content, you’re exposed.
Hype is not a strategy
What Meeker and team offer is a bullish, almost breathless vision of the AI age. And to some extent, we need that optimism. However, practitioners in corporate communications recognise that every exponential tech story inevitably collides with human friction, including regulation, values and the lived experiences of audiences.
That’s what’s missing here.
There’s no serious exploration of AI’s role in stakeholder trust.
No practical insight into how communications teams should govern generative content.
No guidance on internal change narratives for AI adoption.
These are the questions that define whether AI becomes an asset or a liability to a company's reputation.
Meeker’s deck is a brilliant index of AI acceleration. But communicators must answer a different question. One grounded not in velocity, but in credibility. And that means going where the charts don’t.
