Published by Democracy R&D, a global network of 110 organizational and 106 individual members across 58 countries working on citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy, this white paper identifies the field’s top trends through a vote by network members at its 2025 annual conference (171 votes cast), followed by practitioner interviews on the highest-ranked topics, plus 16 featured case studies drawn from 32 submitted assembly examples. It reports cautious, transparency-focused experimentation with AI (mainly for summarizing and translating input rather than analyzing deliberation itself), a funding landscape strained by steep cuts to international democracy assistance including USAID, and emerging efforts to expand who is represented in deliberation, such as children and Indigenous communities. The report was surfaced to the tracker via an NCDD promotional post, but Democracy R&D is the publishing organization.