Gartners Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025

Get ready for the technological trends that will define 2025

Gartner’s research on the top strategic technology trends for 2025 provides guidance for your organization to confidently move into the future. Each emerging technology offers new and effective tools to improve productivity, security and innovation.

CIOs can use the technology trends report to plan for the future, especially now that artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way technology is acquired, deployed, and used in organizations today.

Use strategic technology trends of 2025 to shape the future through responsible innovation

In selecting this year’s top ten strategic technology trends, Gartner analysts grouped them into three themes: AI imperatives and risks, new frontiers of computing, and human-machine synergy.

Topic 1: AI imperatives and risks motivate organizations to protect themselves

Trend 1: Agentic AI : Autonomous AI is capable of planning and executing actions to achieve user-defined objectives.

• Business benefits: A virtual team of agents that assist, offload and complement human work or that of traditional applications.

• Challenges: Good protection measures are needed to ensure that actions match what both the provider and the user want.

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

Business benefits: Create, manage and enforce policies for responsible use of AI, explain how it works, regulate its lifecycle and provide transparency to foster trust and accountability.

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

Trend 3: Security against misinformation : An emerging technology category aimed at systematically evaluating trust.

Business benefits: Reduce fraud by improving identity controls; prevent account takeover through continuous risk assessment, contextual awareness, and an adaptive trust model; and protect brand reputation by identifying damaging narratives.

Challenges: Requires a team approach, adaptive learning, multi-layered and continuously updated.

Topic 2: New frontiers in computing force organizations to reconsider their approach in this area

Trend 4: Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) : Data protection resistant to the decryption risks posed by quantum computing (QC).

Business benefits: Protects data from security risks associated with the advent of quantum computing.

Challenges: Post-quantum cryptography algorithms are not a direct alternative to current asymmetric algorithms. Current applications may have performance issues, will need to be tested, and may need to be rewritten.

Trend 5: Invisible Ambient Intelligence : Technology discreetly integrated into the environment to deliver a more natural and intuitive experience.

• Business Benefits: Facilitates real-time and low-cost object tracking and detection, improving visibility and efficiency, with the potential to ensure genuine provenance and enable objects to report their identity, history and properties.

• Challenges: Providers will need to address privacy concerns and obtain consent for certain data uses. Users may choose to disable labels to protect their privacy.

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 operate systems.

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

• Challenges: New hardware, cloud services, skills, tools, algorithms and applications will be needed. Migration to new computing platforms will be complex and expensive, and energy prices could rise in the short term due to the growing demand for clean energy.

Trend 7: Hybrid computing: combining different computing, storage and networking mechanisms to solve computational problems.

• Business benefits: Highly efficient, rapid and transformative innovation environments; AI surpasses current technological limits; autonomous businesses driven by a higher level of automation; augmented human capabilities enabling real-time personalization at scale, using the human body as a computing platform.

• Challenges: Emerging and complex technologies require specialized knowledge; autonomous module systems carry security risks, involve experimental technologies and high costs, and require good organization and integration.

• Topic 3: Human-machine synergy connects the physical world with the digital world

• Trend 8: Spatial Computing : Digitally enhances the physical world using technologies such as augmented and virtual reality to deliver immersive experiences.

• Business Benefits: Addresses consumer demand for interactive, immersive experiences in gaming, education, and e-commerce, and addresses the need for advanced visualization tools for decision-making and efficiency in industries such as healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.

Challenges: Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are expensive and difficult to use, require frequent recharging, isolate users, and can increase the risk of accidents; user interfaces are complex; privacy and data security are major concerns.

Trend 9: Multi-tasking robots : Robots capable of performing multiple tasks and switching between them as needed.

• Business benefits: Increased efficiency; enable faster ROI; can be deployed more quickly, are scalable and low risk as no changes to architecture or infrastructure are required; can replace or work alongside humans.

• Challenges: The industry has not yet standardized either the price or the minimum required functionalities.

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

• Business benefits: improve human capabilities, increase security, offer personalized education, extend the working life of older people and develop next-generation marketing strategies.

• Challenges: Expensive at first, limited in mobility, wireless connectivity, and battery life; can be invasive and risky; unidirectional brain-machine interfaces (UBMI) and bidirectional brain-machine interfaces (BBMI) interact directly with the human brain, raising safety concerns. Ethical concerns also arise, such as altering users' perception of reality.