New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, today released its inaugural AI Unwrapped: 2025 AI Impact Report, offering a front-row view into how developer choices are fundamentally transforming the AI ecosystem. Drawing from comprehensive aggregated and de-identified usage data from 85,000 active New Relic customers over a year, the report reveals that developers are overwhelmingly embracing the largest general-purpose models, led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which accounted for more than 86% of all LLM tokens processed by New Relic customers.
“AI is rapidly moving from innovation labs and pilot programs into the core of business
operations,” said New Relic Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders. “The data from our 2025 AI
Impact Report shows that while ChatGPT is the undisputed dominant model, developers are
also moving at the ‘speed of AI,’ and rapidly testing the waters with the latest models as soon as
they come out. In tandem, we’re seeing robust growth of our AI monitoring solution. This
underscores that as AI is ingrained in their businesses, our customers are realizing they need to
ensure model reliability, accuracy, compliance, and cost efficiency.”
Developers Rapidly Shift to the Latest ChatGPT models
Enterprises are closely monitoring and adopting the latest innovations from OpenAI. The data
shows ChatGPT-4o has been dominating more recently, followed by ChatGPT-4o mini.
However, adoption of ChatGPT from version-to-version is occurring seemingly overnight as
developers pivot toward newer, better, faster, and cheaper models. New Relic users have been
rapidly shifting from ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo to ChatGPT-4.1 mini since it was announced in April.
This shows that developers value cutting-edge performance and features more than savings.
Developers Start to Experiment with Unique AI Models Across Apps
In a countervailing trend, the findings also highlight increased model diversification as
developers explore open-source alternatives, specialized domain solutions, and task-specific
models, although at a smaller scale. Meta’s Llama emerged as the model that saw the second
largest amount of LLM tokens processed by New Relic customers. In fact, New Relic saw a
92% increase in the number of unique models used across AI apps in the first quarter of 2025.
AI Monitoring Adoption Grows Steadily
Organizations need a unified AI monitoring solution that is easy to set up, configure over time,
and provides an intuitive experience for any user—from DevOps to executives. Since its launch
last year, enterprises have been adopting New Relic AI Monitoring at a steady 30% growth in
usage quarter-over-quarter in the previous 12 months, giving them a solution to ensure AI
model reliability, accuracy, compliance, and cost efficiency.
Python Dominates, but Java is Growing Quickly
With the most momentum, support, and tooling, the data shows Python continues to dominate
AI applications, with customer adoption growing nearly 45% since last quarter. In terms of both
the scale of requests and customer adoption, Node.js followed Python. However, Java usage
has grown rapidly at 34% since last quarter, signaling more production-grade, Java-based LLM
applications are to come from large enterprises.