What can we expect from Digital Asset Management in 2025?

20th November 2024

As 2024 comes to a close, it’s that time again to look ahead to what we can expect from the Digital Asset Management industry in the next 12 months.

Last year, we predicted that AI would have a big impact, we’d continue to see market growth and DAM vendor acquisitions, and that we’d also see DAM systems becoming organisation-wide tools.

We’ll leave it up to you to decide if we (more or less) got it right. In the meantime, let’s take a look at what we expect from Digital Asset Management in 2025.

4 Digital Asset Management industry trends for 2025

1. AI… again
2. Integration with the MarTech stack
3. Decline in on-premise DAM solutions
4. Increased collaborations and interactions within the DAM system

AI… again

When discussing the future of any industry, you’ll almost always end up talking about artificial intelligence, and the Digital Asset Management industry is no different. Indeed, this is the third year in a row we’ve talked about AI in the context of DAM’s future.

It almost feels like cheating to continue including AI in our yearly predictions, but that’s because there’s still so much more to come from the technology. Relative to most tech, AI is still in its infancy, which means developments are coming thick and fast.

At Montala we’ve been putting a lot of work into functionality that uses our OpenAI integration, with image editing in beta testing now and the full version coming in ResourceSpace 10.5.

This is in addition to automated AI metadata tagging which is already possible thanks to our integration with GPT.

We’d expect to see DAM vendors across the board looking for ways to enhance their offering with AI, whether that’s in creating content, editing images on-the-fly, improved metadata management or streamlining processes to make DAM Managers’ lives easier.

READ MORE: OpenAI GPT-4 Image Input – It’s Finally Here

Integration with the MarTech stack

DAM systems are becoming increasingly critical to an organisation’s marketing operations, acting as the single source of truth for visual assets, from storage and management to sharing and even editing.

However, without appropriate integrations, processes slow down and user buy-in drops. For a DAM to be truly considered at the heart of an organisation’s sales and marketing it must integrate with the whole marketing tech stack. This has been a trend in the industry for a while, but 2025 could be the year it finally becomes the norm for a company to be actively using a DAM that’s fully integrated with the entire MarTech stack.

Decline of on-premise DAM solutions

ResourceSpace is available as a cloud solution and an on-premise solution, but there’s no doubt that the number of organisations relying on their own data security processes is declining rapidly.

We expect this is happening industry wide, not least because we’re also one of the few vendors that even offers an on-premise solution.

READ MORE: Is on-premise DAM dead?

There used to be good reasons for preferring an on-premise solution, but the vast majority of these arguments no longer stand up to scrutiny. Cloud storage is no less secure than on-premise (in fact we’d argue that the opposite is often true), while on-prem DAMs also compare poorly in terms of data backups and scalability.

DAM vendors should expect to receive fewer enquiries about on-premise solutions over the next 12 months, with existing on-prem DAM users migrating to the cloud—although the latter will always be a slower process.

Increased collaboration and interaction within the DAM system

We’ve already touched on how Digital Asset Management systems have been growing more integral to the day-to-day operations of an organisation, and that this will continue in 2025. A result of this is that you’ll see more and more collaboration and user interaction occurring within the DAM itself. This includes resource commenting, user tagging and image editing to name just a few examples.

Although DAM Managers might not be familiar with this level of activity within the system itself, the demystification of Digital Asset Management and an increasing understanding of its importance can only be a good thing for the industry as a whole. 

Want to find out what we’ve got in store for ResourceSpace in the next 12 months? Why not book a demo call with one of our experts below? We’ll show you all of the existing features of the DAM, and give insights into what new developments our customers can expect to see in 2025.

ResourceSpace is open source, and we’re always transparent with our users as to what developments are in the pipeline. In some cases, we even work with our customers to build functionality they think is missing.

To find out more click below, or get in touch with the team here.