Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Shaping the Future

In an era of rapidly advancing technology, adaptability is a key factor in staying competitive. Gartner has summarized 10 important trends for 2025 that will help you prepare for the future with trends carefully selected to enhance your business capabilities! These trends are divided into three main themes: AI Imperatives, New Frontiers of Computing, and Human-Machine Synergy. Are you ready to adapt for the future? Use these trends as a guide to prepare your organization for 2025!

Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves

Trend 1: Agentic AI: Autonomous AI can plan and take action to achieve goals set by the user.

• Why trending?: Agentic AI’s ability to take action autonomously or semi autonomously has the potential to help CIOs realize their vision for generative AI to increase productivity across the organization.
• Business benefits: A virtual workforce of agents to assist, offload and augment the work of humans or traditional applications.

Trend 2: AI governance platforms: Technology solutions enable organizations to manage the legal, ethical and operational performance of their AI systems.

• Why trending?: AI is being used in more areas, especially in industries with strict regulations. As AI spreads, so do risks like bias, privacy issues and the need to align with human values. It’s crucial to ensure AI doesn’t harm certain groups, manipulate markets or control important systems.
• Business benefits: Create, manage and enforce policies that ensure responsible use of AI, explain how AI systems work, model lifecycle management, and provide transparency to build trust and accountability.

Trend 3: Disinformation security: An emerging technology category aimed at systematically discerning trust.

• Why trending?: Disinformation is a digital arms race: Phishing, hacktivism, fake news and social engineering are all being turbocharged by adversaries intent on sowing fear, spreading havoc and committing fraud. As AI and machine learning tools become more advanced and accessible, disinformation targeting enterprises is expected to rise, posing significant and lasting risks if left unchecked.
• Business benefits: Decreases fraud by strengthening controls for validating identity; prevents account takeover through continuous risk scoring, contextual awareness and a continuous adaptive trust model; and protects brand reputation by identifying harmful narratives.

Theme No. 2: New frontiers of computing prompt organizations to reconsider how they compute

Trend 4: Post-quantum cryptography (PQC): Data protection that is resistant to quantum computing (QC) decryption risks.

• Why trending?: Quantum computing will soon become a reality, potentially within this decade, and is expected to render many conventional cryptographic methods obsolete, posing a significant risk to data security. Criminals are already anticipating this shift, adopting strategies like “harvest now, decrypt later,” where they exfiltrate encrypted data with the expectation that they will eventually be able to decrypt it using quantum technology. This emerging threat has accelerated the need to prepare for PQC, which offers protection against quantum decryption.
• Business benefits: Protects data from the security risks that will come with the advent of quantum computing.

Trend 5: Ambient invisible intelligence: Technology unobtrusively integrated into the environment to enable a more natural, intuitive experiences

• Why trending?: The technology for low-cost tags and sensors has become more affordable, making it economically attractive. It offers real-time visibility, which is valuable to organizations and supply chains — and could expand into broader ecosystems over time. Advances in wireless standards like Bluetooth and cellular networks, as well as emerging technologies like backscatter and printed electronics, will support new use cases. This intelligence will also become a key data source for AI and analytics, improving products and processes.
• Business benefits: Enables low-cost, real-time tracking and sensing of items, improving visibility and efficiency; potential for unforgeable provenance and new ways for objects to report identity, history and properties.

Trend 6: Energy-efficient computing: An approach to increasing sustainability through more efficient architecture, code and algorithms; hardware optimized for efficiency; and the use of renewable energy to run systems.

• Why trending?: Sustainability is now a board-level focus. IT significantly contributes to environmental footprints, especially in industries like financial services and IT services, as energy intensive technologies like AI drive higher energy consumption. While conventional processing improvements are reaching their limits, new computing technologies, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), neuromorphic computing and quantum computing, are expected to deliver the substantial energy-efficiency gains needed in the next five to 10 years.
• Business benefits: Address legal, commercial and social pressures to improve sustainability by reducing carbon footprint.

Trend 7: Hybrid computing: Hybrid computing combines various technologies — such as CPUs, GPUs, edge devices, ASICs, and neuromorphic, quantum and photonic systems — to solve complex computational problems. It creates a hybrid environment that uses the strengths of each technology to solve computational problems.

• Why trending?: Hybrid computing enables businesses to harness new technologies like photonic, biocomputing, neuromorphic and quantum systems for disruptive impact. GenAI is a key example, where solving complex problems requires advanced computing, networking and storage on a large scale.
• Business benefits: Highly efficient, high-speed, transformative innovation environments; AI that performs beyond current technological limits; autonomous businesses powered by higher levels of automation; augmented human capability allowing real-time personalization at scale and use of the human body as a computing platform.

Theme No. 3: Human-machine synergy brings together the physical and digital worlds

Trend 8: Spatial computing: Digitally enhances the physical world using technologies like augmented and virtual reality to offer immersive experiences.

• Why trending?: Spatial computing is trending due to advances in augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and AI technologies, enabling immersive digital environments across gaming, healthcare and e-commerce. The proliferation of 5G and new devices like Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 are driving consumer demand and opening opportunities for new business models. With major companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm building ecosystems, the market is projected to grow from $110 billion in 2023 to $1.7 trillion by 2033.
• Business benefits: Addresses consumer demand for immersive and interactive experiences in gaming, education and e-commerce; satisfies demand for sophisticated visualization tools for decision making and efficiency in healthcare, retail and manufacturing.

Trend 9: Polyfunctional robots: Robots capable of performing multiple tasks and seamlessly switching between them as required.

• Why trending?: Polyfunctional robots are trending due to rising labor costs and the demand for improved ROI in industries like warehousing and manufacturing. Vendors are driving media attention with competitive price points, making advanced robotics more accessible. While there is a wide range of pricing and capabilities, early adopters are exploring the potential of these robots to handle multiple tasks, promising flexibility and cost-efficiency in businesses.
• Business benefits: Improved efficiency; faster ROI; no need for architectural changes or bolt-down infrastructure means fast deployment, low risk and scalability; can substitute for or work with humans.

Trend 10: Neurological enhancement: Improving cognitive abilities with technologies that read and decode brain activity.

• Why trending?: Neurological enhancement is trending due to its potential to enable brain transparency, revolutionizing healthcare. As AI rapidly evolves, businesses are exploring brain-machine interfaces to help workers upskill and stay competitive by enhancing cognitive abilities. It’s also being looked at to create deeper, personalized consumer experiences and interactions through next-generation marketing tactics.
• Business benefits: Human upskilling, safety improvements, personalized education, allowing older people to work longer, next-generation marketing.

Why These Trends Matter

The highlighted trends not only drive innovation but also address critical challenges like security, sustainability, and human-AI collaboration. Embracing these technologies strategically can position organizations at the forefront of digital transformation.

Resource : Gartner.com