New Relic, the intelligent observability company, has released its first-ever AI Unwrapped: 2025 AI Impact Report, offering deep insight into how 85,000 customers are shaping the AI landscape through their development decisions. The report, based on a full year of aggregated and anonymized usage data, reveals that OpenAI’s ChatGPT accounts for over 86% of all LLM tokens processed, with developers increasingly shifting to the latest models—especially ChatGPT-4o and 4o mini.
As organizations embed AI deeper into operations, observability and monitoring are quickly becoming essential, with New Relic’s AI Monitoring solution seeing 30% quarterly growth across the last 12 months.
Findings from AI Unwrapped 2025
1. ChatGPT Reigns Supreme in LLM Usage
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT handled a staggering 86%+ of all LLM token volume.
- Adoption of newer models like ChatGPT-4o and 4o mini has skyrocketed since their release.
- The transition from GPT-3.5 Turbo to GPT-4.1 mini happened within weeks, showcasing developers’ preference for performance and capabilities over cost.
“AI is rapidly moving from pilot programs into the core of business operations,” said Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic.
2. Developers Exploring Model Diversity
While ChatGPT dominates, the report highlights increasing model experimentation, especially among open-source and task-specific models:
- Meta’s Llama was the second most-used model by token volume.
- There was a 92% increase in the number of unique models used across AI applications in Q1 2025.
This trend suggests developers are balancing dominant general-purpose models with domain-specific or specialized solutions.
3. AI Monitoring Sees 30% Growth per Quarter
AI observability is emerging as mission-critical:
- 30% quarter-over-quarter growth in adoption of New Relic AI Monitoring over the last year.
- Enterprises are prioritizing model reliability, compliance, and cost efficiency, with solutions that can scale from DevOps teams to executives.
4. Python Leads, Java Accelerates
- Python remains the top language for AI development, with 45% quarter-over-quarter growth.
- Node.js holds second place in adoption volume.
- Java is rising fast with 34% growth, signaling broader enterprise adoption and the rise of production-grade LLM applications in Java environments.
Methodology
This report is based on aggregated and de-identified usage data from 85,000 active New Relic customers, collected between April 30, 2024, and April 30, 2025.
Developers Drive the Future of AI
New Relic’s AI Unwrapped 2025 shows that developers are the vanguard of enterprise AI transformation. With ChatGPT adoption leading, tooling expanding, and AI monitoring becoming essential, the developer ecosystem is proving to be the most dynamic force shaping how AI is built, deployed, and scaled.
