Fallback Image

AI, trust, accessibility & search

Digital Challenges and Trends 2025

Danish digital pioneer Janus Boye once again took the time to talk to us about the challenges and trends in the digital sector. What characterised the industry in 2024 and what can we expect in 2025?

Janus Boye has been working in the field of innovation and digital leadership for 25 years. He and byte5 have been friends for a long time, and every year in December we talk about current trends and challenges.

Last year, we talked about the new challenges that came along with AI. It has now becomei mpossible to imagine our work without AI. How has AI shaped the way we work?

A great deal is happening in the field of AI. In 2024, a sort of reality check has taken place. AI is becoming increasingly exciting for driving innovative solutions and experiments. At the same time, its value is becoming clear for a wider range of use cases. For a long time, many opportunities in the digital space remained untouched by automation, as the focus was primarily on implementing solutions. While there might have been some AI operating in the background, we didn’t really talk about it much before ChatGPT. Now, AI is being actively utilized on the technical side with various co-pilots, as well as on the non-technical side for tasks like summarizing interviews. There are numerous application areas where AI proves to be highly beneficial.

 

The second area I find particularly exciting is how software companies are using AI for interesting demos, almost like small gimmicks: “Make this headline longer/shorter,” “Adjust the tone,” and similar smaller tasks. We’ve already made some progress here. What excites me even more is the potential for AI to support accessibility—a topic we’ll explore further later on. For instance, AI can help automatically generate alt texts for images. There’s still a long journey ahead in terms of accessibility, but I’m genuinely excited that AI can make a meaningful contribution.

 

In addition to software companies, agencies play a key role. For agencies, 2024 was the year it became unmistakably clear that AI has a significant impact. While software companies can add new features or integrate AI support here and there, clients now expect agencies to have AI as a standard part of their toolkit. This shift has raised the bar: if clients were once willing to wait 10 weeks for a prototype or 6 weeks for mockups, they now expect twice the output in half the time.

 

On the bright side, this represents a tremendous opportunity for agencies. After all, even with AI, the work doesn’t do itself—it requires skilled prompting and thoughtful integration. However, it’s also a major transformation. And, as with any significant change, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. This became particularly evident in 2024: things are evolving rapidly, and this trend is set to continue into 2025.

In your November newsletter, you talk about "trust" - a central element of every business relationship, but also of every human relationship in general. And AI has an impact here too. What challenges will this pose for the digital industry in the future?

This is a significant challenge. Personally, I find the topic of trust between people more important than ever, especially in these polarizing times. Trust and human interaction have taken on even greater importance. Of course, AI plays a role in this, as do smartphones and social media. During the holiday season, for example, when I visit websites to shop for gifts, trust becomes a critical factor. Can I trust the content? Where do the products come from? Were they created by humans or with AI support? Transparency in this regard is still in its infancy. The same applies to LinkedIn, where you often wonder: Are the images and text genuinely human-made and authentic?

 

Trust was a key theme at our annual conference in November. This so-called trust crisis isn’t new—it existed even before the pandemic. I find it fascinating to observe, as a consumer, citizen, and internet user: Where do I place the most trust, and how has that shifted over time? Keynote speaker Tim Walters, a former Forrester analyst, summed it up perfectly: trust, he said, shares a fundamental similarity with love. You can’t just demand, “You must love me,” or “You must trust me”—you have to behave in a way that earns credibility. The same holds true for software companies and agencies. Simply writing “You can trust us” on a website isn’t enough. In the end, it’s the customer who decides whether to trust or not. Over the centuries, we’ve learned that these decisions are made in milliseconds. Over the last 10 to 20 years, we’ve had to adapt to this reality in the digital world. Unfortunately, I get the impression that many companies are currently heading in the wrong direction. The pandemic presented an ideal opportunity to build digital trust, but surveys show that trust in politics, companies, and institutions has been steadily declining. This is a serious problem because trust is what connects us, enables collaboration, and ensures we don’t constantly have to reinvent the wheel.

 

This topic is closely tied to AI, as new technology allows us to achieve more—faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost. But AI doesn’t solve all problems, and trust is one of the clearest examples of where human action is still essential. Across all areas, we need to ask ourselves: How do we handle this—in projects, at work? In my collaboration with byte5, New Work has always been an important focus for me, and trust plays a central role in this. Can I work from home? During the pandemic, we've learned that much more is possible than we previously thought. However, in 2024, many larger corporations began asking employees to return to the office. Trust is also a key factor in “psychological safety,” though not the only one. Do I feel trusted enough to provide honest feedback, even if it’s critical? And how is that feedback received?

 

Acting with trust is an area where our industry still has room for improvement. For too long, the attitude has been: as long as everything runs smoothly, everyone is happy. But this often leads to IT projects failing spectacularly and becoming extremely costly for clients. When that happens, we need to ask: How did it go so wrong? Clearly, there’s still work to be done. Perhaps IT projects need to become more modular—like Lego, which is always a great Danish example. For me, the relationship between AI, trust, and IT projects has been a major revelation this year.

What other topics were you focussing on this year?

Accessibility, as I mentioned earlier, is a critical topic. With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) on the horizon, there’s a sense of collective guilt within the digital industry. Most people who have worked on web projects for more than two years are well aware that accessibility could have been handled better. It’s unfortunate that we need to rely on authorities in Brussels to enforce progress, much like with GDPR. In that case, Germany may have been a trailblazer, and I thought GDPR was a positive step. I hope the EAA will follow a similar path because we still have a long way to go. In my view, CMS providers could play a more proactive role in simplifying compliance with accessibility guidelines.

 

This ties in with the topic of search, which caught me off guard by how prominent it became. I think this shift is closely connected to AI. These days, I might turn to ChatGPT instead of Google to find answers. This marks a major change in 2024: people now want direct, actionable answers or product recommendations without having to sift through a list of search results. For the past two decades, the process has felt stagnant—you type in keywords or a question, and you’re given a list of results. But now, in 2024, the question has become: “Why do I need a list of results?” Why not get the answer directly? This shift reflects our rising expectations, particularly with AI. There’s still much work to be done to develop truly effective solutions in this space.

 

Accessibility and search are two trends that have already gained momentum in 2024 and are poised to grow even further in the coming year.

 

In the last interview, we talked about sustainability and you said that the topic of sustainability in digitalisation is still in its infancy. In your opinion, has anything changed in 2024?

Yes, I believe we’re making progress, but it’s a slow process that requires time. It’s similar to the challenges of search and accessibility—it takes a long time to build awareness. This is something I’ve noticed at conferences as well. When you have a video call, there’s a carbon footprint involved, just as there is when you buy a new iPhone. We’ve come to understand that taking the train is greener than flying, but the connection to our digital world hasn’t fully clicked yet. However, there is a positive overlap with accessibility. When I create clean and efficient solutions, they’re often more sustainable as well. This creates motivation to streamline websites and adhere to accessibility guidelines. I’ve noticed that large corporations are improving—for example, opting for a video with a play button rather than an autoplay video, which is both more sustainable and more accessible. Even the major cloud companies, like Amazon, have made significant strides this year. As part of content reporting, I can now include in my sustainability report how much I’m spending on cloud computing. I think this is a step in the right direction for raising awareness. We’re moving forward.

 

I’m also pleased to see that companies like Umbraco have established sustainability teams, because we need that kind of commitment from software providers as well. At the moment, this feels like a predominantly European initiative. Unfortunately, I sense less of this momentum in North America, but I can imagine it spreading from Europe, much like the early days of smartphones. Of course, we all have individual responsibilities, but with the involvement of agencies and software providers, there’s an opportunity to drive structural change.

You also talk about open source on your blog and say: Open source CMS needs to change to survive - what challenges do you see for open source CMS at the moment and in the coming years?

This was the focus of a longer talk in Düsseldorf two weeks ago. The first question is, “Why change?”—because for many, the topic of change has become almost tiresome. The answer to this question was addressed in our discussion: because customers expect it. Looking at the major players in the open-source CMS market, we see platforms like WordPress, which is currently facing challenges, Drupal CMS, and others. This raises the question of whether there has been too much focus on the technical side. Perhaps we could do a better job catering to less tech-savvy individuals, such as those working in marketing.

 

When we expand the perspective beyond CMS to the broader open-source space, we see significant success. Open source is widely adopted, with companies like Google investing heavily in it. A major topic for the open-source community in the coming years, I believe, will be diversity. Many agencies and open-source projects are led by men who look like me—people who’ve been successfully driving these initiatives for 10 to 15 years, often far more successfully than I have, which is fantastic. Many are already mindful of diversity. However, when I attend conferences and camps, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go.

 

The inclusion of younger individuals is also an ongoing challenge. Why would someone just starting their career choose to invest in platforms like Umbraco or Drupal? This is a question every open-source project needs to answer for itself. Open source, in a positive sense, feels a bit like a family gathering. But that can make it difficult for newcomers to feel welcome, especially when the room is full of people who have been part of the community since 2005. This is something open source needs to reflect on. Open source operates a bit like a democracy: participation is key. You need to contribute—whether it’s with code, blog posts, or by organizing events. Only then does progress happen.

Thank you very much for the interview and your, as always, interesting assessment, Janus.