Editor’s Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone’s 2025 Trend Report, Generative AI: The Democratization of Intelligent Systems.

In today’s world of software development, we are seeing a rapid shift in how we design and build applications, mainly driven by the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) across industries. These intelligent applications can understand and respond to users’ questions in a more dynamic way, which help enhance customer experiences, automate workflows, and drive innovation. Generative AI — mainly powered by large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI GPT, Meta Llama, and Anthropic Claude — has changed the game by making it easy to understand natural language text and respond with new content such as text, images, audio, and even code.