Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025

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

• Business benefits: A virtual workforce of agents to assist, offload and augment the work of humans or traditional applications.

• Challenges: Requires robust guardrails to ensure alignment with providers’ and users’ intentions.

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

• Challenges: AI guidelines vary across regions and industries, making it difficult to establish consistent practices.

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

• 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.

• Challenges: Requires a continuously updated, multilayered, adaptive learning, team approach.

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

• Business benefits: Protects data from the security risks that will come with the advent of quantum computing.

• Challenges: PQC algorithms are not drop-in replacements for existing asymmetric algorithms. Current applications may have performance issues, will require testing and may need to be rewritten.

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

• 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.

• Challenges: Providers will have to address privacy concerns and obtain consent for some types of data use. Users may opt to disable tags to preserve privacy.

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

• Business benefits: Address legal, commercial and social pressures to improve sustainability by reducing carbon footprint.

• Challenges: New hardware, cloud services, skills, tools, algorithms and applications will be required; migrating to new computing platforms will be complex and expensive; energy prices may rise in the short term as green energy demand increases.

Trend 7: Hybrid computing: Combines different compute, storage and network mechanisms to solve computational problems.

• 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 personalisation at scale and use of the human body as a computing platform.

• Challenges: Nascent, highly complex technologies require specialised skills; a system of autonomous modules introduces security risks; involves experimental technologies and high costs; need for orchestration and integration.

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

• Business benefits: Addresses consumer demand for immersive and interactive experiences in gaming, education and e-commerce; satisfies demand for sophisticated visualisation tools for decision making and efficiency in healthcare, retail and manufacturing.

• Challenges: Head-mounted displays are expensive and unwieldy, require frequent charging, isolate users and may increase the potential for accidents; user interfaces are complex; data privacy and security are major concerns.

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

• 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.

• Challenges: The industry hasn’t yet standardised on price or minimum functionality required.

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

• Business benefits: Human upskilling, safety improvements, personalised education, allowing older people to work longer, next-generation marketing..

• Challenges: Initially expensive, limited battery and options for mobility and wireless connectivity; invasive and risky; UBMIs and BBMIs interface directly with the human brain, creating security challenges; ethical concerns (e.g. altering users’ perception of reality).