Making regulatory compliance topics and processes accessible and scalable with generative AI.

AI in 2025: From Hype to Habit

Two years ago, AI was still treated like an experiment. Businesses dabbled, tested, and toyed with it, often with one eye on the hype and the other on the risk. Today, that phase is over.

In our 2023 white paper Supercharge Your Business with AI, we set out five predictions for how the technology would evolve. Two years on, those themes remain highly relevant — but with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see what came true, what's still evolving and where things are going next.

Nick Butterfield, founder of Remote Automation, explains:

“Traditionally the solution to the problem has been simply to aerate the water – using mechanical interventions such as pumps, diffusers and splashbox paddles. But as we all know from widespread news coverage, water habitats are a fragile ecosystem – and can go from normal to hazardous very quickly. Activating the interventions is usually too little too late, as fish deaths tend to happen all at once. So the answer in commercial fish farms has been to run these machines 24/7, at immense cost and energy consumption.

“One commercial fish farm, for example one we know in Saudi Arabia, can run 5,000 aerators non-stop. Given that it costs us £6,000 per aerator per year in energy bills, we could see clearly how unsustainable this approach to water quality management is.”

Lawrence Dudley, co-founder of Techknow, adds:

“We needed to build software, firmware and hardware to monitor and predict both water quality and external (environmental, chemistry and weather) factors, in order to activate the right interventions at the right time. Crucially, given that this also means running certain machines very infrequently instead of permanently, we also needed to be able to remotely monitor, maintain and test them so they wouldn’t fail at the critical moment.

“The AI layer transforms vast amounts of raw environmental data into actionable predictions, risk alerts, optimisations, and planning insights. The kit itself can be installed in minutes, connected to mains or solar power and via IoT connectivity to centralised monitoring, so it can run in any location.”

Nick Butterfield concludes:

“We don’t need to look far to see another news story about the water quality crisis. Even the Olympics had their own news headlines when the River Seine was feared to be off limits for water events – before a massive cleanup operation saved the day. Until our technology was developed, there was no way of remotely monitoring, predicting and responding to water quality data in this way, so it’s truly a world first.”