Five years after AlphaFold 2 debuted, Google DeepMind’s protein-structure AI has shifted from breakthrough to routine: researchers and graduate programs now treat AlphaFold as a standard instrument akin to microscopes or petri dishes. DeepMind scientists John Jumper and Pushmeet Kohli say the tool has outpaced expectations, accelerating drug discovery and enabling new avenues in climate and agricultural research. The 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry honored contributions from the AlphaFold team, underscoring the model’s scientific impact. Universities report AlphaFold training has been incorporated into graduate curricula and lab workflows. Biology departments and research offices should factor AlphaFold into grant planning, experimental design, and computational infrastructure decisions as structural prediction becomes an assumed capability in molecular research.