The 2025 AI Engineering Report — Barr Yaron, Amplify

AI Engineering Landscape - The AI engineering community is broad, technical, and growing, with the "AI Engineer" title expected to gain more ground [5] - Many seasoned software developers are AI newcomers, with nearly half of those with 10+ years of experience having worked with AI for three years or less [7] LLM Usage and Customization - Over half of respondents are using LLMs for both internal and external use cases, with OpenAI models dominating external, customer-facing applications [8] - LLM users are leveraging them across multiple use cases, with 94% using them for at least two and 82% for at least three [9] - Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the most popular customization method, with 70% of respondents using it [10] - Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like LoRA/Q-LoRA are strongly preferred, mentioned by 40% of fine-tuners [12] Model and Prompt Management - Over 50% of respondents are updating their models at least monthly, with 17% doing so weekly [14] - 70% of respondents are updating prompts at least monthly, and 10% are doing so daily [14] - A significant 31% of respondents lack any system for managing their prompts [15] Multimodal AI and Agents - Image, video, and audio usage lag text usage significantly, indicating a "multimodal production gap" [16][17] - Audio has the highest intent to adopt among those not currently using it, with 37% planning to eventually adopt audio [18] - While 80% of respondents say LLMs are working well, less than 20% say the same about agents [20] Monitoring and Evaluation - Most respondents use multiple methods to monitor their AI systems, with 60% using standard observability and over 50% relying on offline evaluation [22] - Human review remains the most popular method for evaluating model and system accuracy and quality [23] - 65% of respondents are using a dedicated vector database [24] Industry Outlook - The mean guess for the percentage of the US Gen Z population that will have AI girlfriends/boyfriends is 26% [27] - Evaluation is the number one most painful thing about AI engineering today [28]