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The AI Stack Grows Up
A 2025 Retrospective on Enterprise AI, Infrastructure, and the Rise of Governed Autonomy
Enterprise AI has reached an inflection point. In 2025, the conversation shifted decisively from what AI can do to whether it can be operated, governed, and scaled inside real organizations. The AI Stack Grows Up is a synthesis of HyperFRAME Research coverage across the year, examining how enterprise AI evolved from model-centric experimentation into a systems-level discipline defined by infrastructure, data gravity, agent governance, and execution rigor. This research brief explores why platforms, not features, emerged as the true competitive battleground, how agentic AI matured only when trust and control mechanisms followed capability, and what this transition signals for enterprise priorities heading into 2026.
Key Highlights
AI maturity exposed organizational, not technical, bottlenecks.
Infrastructure, data, and governance converged into a single stack reality.
Agentic AI advanced only when control mechanisms followed capability.
Vendor success correlated with stack depth and integration, not model performance alone.
Enterprises rewarded realism over ambition and demanded proof, not promises.
Stephanie Walter | Practice Leader, AI Stack
Stephanie Walter is a results-driven technology executive and analyst in residence with over 20 years leading innovation in Cloud, SaaS, Middleware, Data, and AI. She has guided product life cycles from concept to go-to-market in both senior roles at IBM and fractional executive capacities, blending engineering expertise with business strategy and market insights. From software engineering and architecture to executive product management, Stephanie has driven large-scale transformations, developed technical talent, and solved complex challenges across startup, growth-stage, and enterprise environments.