That’s not to say this past year was all puppy dogs and ice cream, it definitely wasn’t. Even though we did get a puppy this year. Outside of the work itself, and the structure and rigour the process and deadlines afforded, the entire year was hard, stressful, scary and rather painful. 2025 was a year like no other for tension. The rapidly evolving AI race hit a fever pitch this year, exploding exponentially in terms of what it can do, how well it can do it, and the general perception of what jobs, services, and well, people it could now replace. 

While we’ve worked on AI-powered products and services for years, the shift from AI-inside the products we envisioned and built, to AI-everything, everywhere you look in every aspect of business and life in general was earlier, faster and more monumental than anyone could have anticipated. Throughout 2025, it felt like AI was constantly rewriting the rules, folding spacetime, and pulling rugs out from under things that were defacto-standards just the day before. 

If you’ve read any of my musings on AI over the last couple years, it’s been a mix of excitement, fear, and asking myself where I, and the work I do, fit in an AI-enabled world. I’ve been on a journey, as I’m sure many have, and I’ve tried to share my perspectives transparently as they evolved. And evolve they did. The TLDR is: I went from creatives are safe thanks to craft and uniqueness of thought, to no one is safe at all. Period.

This year forced us to look at things in uncomfortable ways, question everything, toss aside traditions, norms and best practices, and look at the issues we previously accepted unavoidable with raw, fresh, vulnerable eyes. The depth of introspection, both as a business, and as individuals, was awkward, existential, and at times, grinding. This, while everything around us, and everything we were trying to get a good handle on, was changing faster than we could even identify that it changed. New models, new capabilities, new workflows, new ways of working seemingly popping up weekly by the end of the year. There wasn’t a single piece of solid ground to stand on for what seems like the whole year. It certainly isn’t going to slow down in 2026, it’s only going to get faster and bigger. Exponentially so.

If I had to pick a word to represent 2025, perhaps obviously, the first one that comes to mind is: “chaos”. It’s definitely not the wrong word. 2025 was filled with questions, existential fear, uncertainty, and a perpetual feeling of holding on by our fingertips. However, even though “chaos” isn’t wrong… it’s not the right word either. 

In 2025, tension wasn’t chaotic. The chaos was the environment and the situation that motivated, caused and triggered a rebirth, a metamorphosis of our ethos. Amidst the storm, the questions, the crumbling of all that we take for granted, 2025 was a year of self-discovery, of curiosity, of experimentation, and self-reimagining. 

We took a long, hard look at what we do, what we offer, and how we deliver it — and came to terms with the fact that the models and methodologies we’ve exploited since starting tension no longer fit in the new world we exist within. We took it as an opportunity to re-evaluate everything. Literally everything. And after the fear was faced head on, and the uncertainty embraced, only excitement and optimism remained. 

We’ve reimagined our processes, workflows, technologies, capabilities and even our pricing. We’ve shaved weeks from our timelines, while delivering more than we ever could before, even with twice the time it used to take. We’ve done away with painstaking, time consuming tasks and production efforts that were foundational to the work we do, in lieu of new technologies that let us put our ideas in front of clients in hours, rather than weeks. 

A friend summed it up perfectly in a chat we had just this week: “the technology has finally caught up with the things we were imagining and trying to do twenty years ago.” This isn’t chaos. This isn’t doom. This is the tectonic shift that frees us from the confines of yesterday. This is the unlock.

In 2026, tension is emerging as a completely reimagined and reborn company. A more agile, adaptable, and focused business that serves our customers in new ways, faster, smarter and better than ever before. Stay tuned, as we’ll be rolling out what this means for our clients over the next little while.

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This isn’t a rebrand, nor a repositioning. tension is still tension. This is an evolutionary concentration of what has always separated tension: seeing what others don’t, in ways that most can’t.

Happy New Year!

Adam

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