Every year for the last three years, we’ve shared major announcements from the mainstage of WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin at pivotal moments in our journey. In 2023, we launched OverflowAI, our flagship AI initiative for our users and enterprise customers, while last year, we revealed our vision for the Knowledge as a Service model and high-quality, trusted data as the currency that will define the new era of the internet. 2025 so far has been a year marked by significant experimentation and evolution for us as a company and exploration of how we can continue to be of service to the world’s technologists. At the beginning of the year, we along with our Head of Community Philippe Beaudette held our first ever live AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) session, when we shared our plans to introduce new features and formats of engagement for our users, and hear directly from some of our community members. In that same spirit, today on the WeAreDevelopers stage we unveiled our new vision, mission statement, and the latest product updates for our public platform users and enterprise customers. We wanted to provide a bit of a peek behind the curtain on our future and why Stack Overflow remains the most vital source for technology enthusiasts around the world.
The Open Web has had many transformations. Since its founding in 2008, Stack Overflow has had a front row seat to myriad shifts in the landscape—from the rise of cloud computing in the early 2010s, the rise of remote work during the pandemic, and now the GenAI era that began in late 2022 that has defined not only the technology industry but changed the face of society, communication, and public life since then. Over the last six months, we’ve approached our evolution with one question: “What’s the future of Stack Overflow in an AI world?” The way that developers, especially ones at the beginning of their professional careers, engage with technology and learn to code is vastly different now in 2025 than in 2008 when our public platform was founded. Not only do technologists turn to a vast array of resources, from AI chat bots, online video platforms, and discussion forums to find solutions to their queries and sharpen their skills, but the very definition of a developer has expanded. With these realities in mind, we’re looking ahead to how we can continue to serve technologists across the globe.
A vital and trusted source in the age of AI
Today onstage, we shared a sneak peek of the findings of our fifteenth annual Developer Survey, our flagship survey that polls our community on all topics important to those who code, which will be released in the next few weeks. We’ve asked our users about their thoughts on and use of AI, and a striking pattern has emerged. For the third year in a row, we've seen the number of developers using AI tools in their workflow continue to increase year over year, with 83% saying they use or plan to use AI tools in their development process this year, an increase over 2024 (76%). However, the lack of trust in AI tools also continues to rise with 46% of respondents saying they do not trust the output of AI, up significantly from 26% last year.
With the use of AI now ubiquitous and ‘AI slop’ rapidly replacing the content we see online, this trust gap is where we think Stack Overflow can play a role. Our renewed vision and purpose moving forward is to be the world’s most vital source for technologists. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe we can serve technologists with our mission to cultivate community, power learning, and unlock growth.
Our next act
Stack Overflow’s journey over the years has never been a simple one or easy to define. We’re most known by our origins as a question and answer platform by and for technical experts, but in 2010 we expanded to include B2C offerings with the larger Stack Exchange network and our Careers product to help developers find their next job, followed by our move into the Enterprise in 2018 with Stack Overflow for Teams, our internal version of our public offering to help teams collaborate. Now in the age of AI post 2023, we’ve entered our next phase and recently introduced our Knowledge Solutions offering that partners like OpenAI, Google Cloud, and Moveworks utilize to power their AI solutions with our trusted and accurate corpus of data. With this evolution and the pace of change showing no sign of slowing down, we realized a radical simplification of our brand architecture was in order. Our public platform, including the Stack Exchange network, will now be known simply as Stack Overflow, while Stack Overflow Business will comprise our Ads business, Stack Internal (formerly known as Stack Overflow for Teams), and Stack Data Licensing (formerly known as Knowledge Solutions).
In addition to evolving our brand architecture, we’re also actively experimenting with and expanding modes of engagement beyond Q&A for our public platform to reflect our new mission: to support ALL the builders of the future in an AI world—with clarity, speed, and humanity. It’s about showing up in a way that reflects who we are today, and where we’re headed tomorrow.
Cornerstones of community, learning, and growth
One of the ways we’re activating on the Cultivate community part of our mission is to introduce features such as Community Activity and resurfacing and refreshing older and less used features such as Chat. Community Activity is a new feature we’re experimenting with that displays active users online and the number of users who have asked questions in the last 24 hours. You can think of it as the heartbeat of the community, providing a real-time view into just how active and engaged the community is. As we continue to experiment, you’ll see Community Activity expand to more areas of the site and feature additional ways to engage in the community.
Chat is a real-time conversational space for developers to solve and socialize in a more casual way than our traditional Q&A format. Chat has been on our site for ages, but we’ve made it more accessible to more people and brought it front and center.
As we expand the site to support the career growth and continuous education of technologists worldwide, we want to make it easy to navigate to wherever you need to go and Power learning for those who visit our site. Many of us begin our search for answers with AI tools, but often once we get an answer, there’s a lack of certainty that those answers can be trusted or perhaps the answers you’re receiving are incomplete or lack the appropriate context. Stackoverflow.ai is a new way to support that discovery and learn along the way. This AI-powered search and discovery tool provides a familiar, natural language experience, but it’s enriched with clear connections to trusted and human-verified knowledge from Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. You can ask questions, validate AI answers and dive deep into technical topics through relevant content, or choose a convenient path to connect with the community - all with step-by-step guidance.
We’ve also recently introduced Coding Challenges to our site! These new challenges represent a new, fun way for developers to level up by tackling captivating puzzles and earning recognition for your skills and creativity. It’s a rewarding way to practice and expand your knowledge with the Stack Overflow community in a space that celebrates diverse and unique approaches.
As AI becomes more pervasive, the efficacy of AI systems will increasingly depend on access to verifiable and accurate knowledge. That will extend to job opportunities too as people look for guidance on exciting career prospects, and this is why we aim to Unlock growth for those who come to Stack Overflow or use our products.
This is where Stack Internal (currently Stack Overflow for Teams), the private Stack Overflow for enterprises, comes into the picture. Today, we introduced three new capabilities for Stack Internal that make it the essential knowledge intelligence layer for AI tools and solutions within organizations.
The first is Knowledge Ingestion. Currently in pilot with several of our large enterprise partners, Knowledge Ingestion converts high-value content from tools like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and others into structured, trusted knowledge inside a Stack Internal instance. It’s designed to eliminate silos, accelerate onboarding, and scale institutional wisdom.
With developers exchanging valuable information across the enterprise in a variety of tools, we want to make human-validated and trusted knowledge from Stack Internal available wherever they’re working. We’ve recently launched a number of new Connectors that can support this including the Stack Overflow Connector for Microsoft Graph, which indexes and surfaces trusted Stack Internal content into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Additionally, our brand new integration with Backstage.io allows users to ask a question directly in their portal, access a dedicated Stack Overflow page with searchable tags and users, and get search results consistent with the Stack Internal platform. Our integration with Moveworks brings an installable Stack Overflow agent to Moveworks’ AI Agent Marketplace that users can interact with their Stack Internal instance using natural language.
Finally, we shared that a bi-directional MCP (model context protocol) server is on the horizon. MCP is a layer built on top of the Stack Internal APIs that enables LLMs and AI agents to connect with data sources and interact with customers’ Stack Internal data more efficiently. Stay tuned for more updates on this and Knowledge Ingestion!
Realigned identity and vision
As our products and platform have morphed over the years, our audiences have grown alongside them. However, this expansion has resulted in our brand becoming stretched and eroding its clear identity and consistency. Over the last several months, we’ve been hard at work internally exploring what a refreshed visual identity for us might look like. Today onstage we shared a preview of some of the directions we’ve been considering. Additionally, in the spirit of keeping community at our center, we also are asking you—our global community of users—to weigh in! Explore the options and vote now.
At Stack Overflow we believe we have a pioneering role to play in shifting the conversation around the importance of attribution to our larger knowledge communities and trusted sources of data to secure a future with sustainable technological progress. By bringing together quality data and human experience to create sustainable, vital communities, we can build a future of Stack Overflow and the internet together that drives innovation and growth for all.