Generative AI has integrated into digital workflows at a speed that few anticipated. According to Stanford’s AI Index Report 2025, 78% of organizations worldwide reported using some form of AI in 2024, up from 55% a year earlier. Global private investment in generative AI reached $33.9 billion in 2024. These figures mask a more nuanced reality, particularly in France, where adoption remains confined to specific areas.
Generative AI in business: widespread but not transformative
The Bank of France notes that more than two-thirds of French companies with 20 or more employees use generative AI tools. The details matter: nearly all of these uses pertain to support functions (marketing, administration, HR, finance). Only about 14% of companies employ them in their production processes.
We observe the same pattern among agencies and web publishers. AI is used to produce drafts, summarize briefs, and generate variations of email subjects. It does not reconfigure business models. AI accelerates execution without transforming strategy, and this is a point that most annual reports overlook.
This reality has direct consequences on web and digital trends: tools are multiplying, budgets remain cautious, and measurable return on investment is slow to materialize for French SMEs. Professionals who treat AI as a lever for raw productivity, without rethinking their business processes, risk hitting a plateau quickly.
Advertising regulation and DSA: what changes concretely for online brands
The Digital Services Act (DSA) redefines the obligations of platforms and, by extension, those of advertisers. Very large platforms must make their recommendation systems transparent and offer users the option to disable ad profiling. For brands investing in social ads on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, this means a gradual loss of granularity in behavioral targeting.
This regulatory framework pushes marketing teams to rethink their mix. Organic content, first-party data strategies, and collaborations with content creators are gaining relative weight. We recommend following these regulatory developments on The Web Brains’ website, which regularly documents the impact of these texts on digital practices.
The planned end of third-party cookies on Chrome, postponed several times, has pushed companies to invest in proprietary data architectures. CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) and consent-based collection strategies are becoming technical prerequisites, not options.
Social search and new search behaviors on social networks
TikTok and Instagram now function as search engines for a significant share of users, particularly those under 30. Queries typed into the TikTok search bar focus on products, restaurants, tutorials, and reviews. This behavior redistributes the cards of traditional SEO.
Specifically, brands must optimize their short video content for internal search on social platforms. The criteria differ from Google SEO:
- Text overlaid on the video (captions on-screen) weighs as much as the textual description in TikTok indexing
- Niche hashtags (fewer than 500,000 posts) generate a better discovery rate than generic hashtags
- Complete watch duration (watch-through rate) remains the dominant ranking signal on both platforms
Optimizing for social search requires content production thought out from the script, not just a simple recycling of existing posts. Companies that treat TikTok as a secondary distribution channel miss out on a full-fledged acquisition channel.
Social commerce and integrated shopping experience on platforms
Social commerce has moved beyond the experimental stage. TikTok Shop, Instagram shops, and live shopping features are transforming social networks into marketplaces. The user experience converges towards a seamless shopping tunnel: discovery, evaluation, payment, everything happens within the same application.
For brands, this implies technical adjustments:
- Synchronization of the product catalog with the APIs of social platforms
- Management of customer service directly in integrated messaging (Instagram DMs, TikTok messages)
- Tracking conversions attributed to social commerce, distinct from traditional e-commerce
Companies that already master their online customer experience have a structural advantage. Those that have not yet unified their stock management between their website and social platforms are accumulating operational delays that are difficult to catch up on.
Web accessibility and mobile performance: technical criteria that have become discriminating
The Core Web Vitals remain a Google ranking factor, but the real change in 2024 concerns Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which has replaced First Input Delay as the interactivity metric. INP measures the overall responsiveness of the page throughout the session, not just the first interaction. Sites with heavy third-party scripts (chatbots, consent widgets, tracking pixels) are the first to be penalized.
On the accessibility side, the European Accessibility Act will come into effect in June 2025. E-commerce sites and digital services will need to comply with the EN 301 549 standard. We observe that the majority of French sites are not compliant, due to a lack of recent RGAA audits. The cost of compliance mechanically increases when delayed.
The digital trends in 2024 are not limited to AI or social networks. The regulatory layer (DSA, accessibility, end of third-party cookies) and technical evolutions (INP, social search, integrated commerce) are reshaping priorities. Teams that allocate their budgets solely based on AI-assisted content production are neglecting structural projects whose impact is measured over several years.
