Nearly all the gurus at Gartner's list of top 10 strategic technology trends to watch in 2025, released on Monday, would not exist without the help of artificial intelligence.
"This year's top strategic technology trends span AI imperatives and risks, new frontiers of computing and human-machine synergy," said Gartner Vice President Analyst Gene Alvarez in a statement. "Tracking these trends will help IT leaders shape the future of their organizations with responsible and ethical innovation."
Along with this, the most prominent and top-rated systems on the list included Agentic AI systems, which could autonomously plan actions for execution based on user-defined goals. At least 15% of day-to-day work decisions would be autonomously decided by Agentic AI by 2028, compared to a 0% score in 2024.
This is most definitely the future of enterprise workforce-a de facto representation of agentic AI," said Ambuj Kumar, founder of Simbian, a provider of autonomous AI agents for cybersecurity, in Mountain View, Calif.
"Imagine a field like security, which suffers from an acute shortage of 3.5 million workers, employees are overworked, and new emerging threats are constantly popping up," he told TechNewsWorld. "How attractive would be an offering that provides virtual employees always trained with the latest and greatest, cost 10 times less than humans, work 24×7, and can scale elastically based on business demands? That is the promise of AI Agents."
Agentic AI Challenges
However, Agentic AI technology has some challenges to address if it wants to achieve the penetration Gartner predicts. "Designing effective Agentic AI systems is still experimental," noted Sandi Besen, an applied AI researcher at IBM and Neudesic, a global professional services company.
"As AI engineers and solution architects continue to refine their approaches, the field will evolve," she told TechNewsWorld.
Many popular Agentic frameworks approach the design of creating an AI system differently. While LangChain and Autogen are pretty much language model-dependent, others, like LangGraph, are using AI agents more systematically and rule-based workflows.
Depending on the design, which is still a matter of evolution, we will probably see as much success as failure before industry-wide best practices emerge.
More, she added, "The willingness of businesses to adopt these evolving systems will also be a major factor in the scalability and long-term success of Agentic AI."
"As AI advances, it has the potential to further improve productivity and provide workers with new ways to solve problems," said Jennifer Huddleston, a technology policy research fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.
There are lots of different ways this may happen and some are quite industry-specific, very significant, and others are more subtle," she said.
"The precise integration of AI and the productivity benefits of AI will, naturally enough, differ by job and sector, but it is critical that policy does not attempt to anticipate all the possible applications and leaves industry and technology to offer useful choices to address many kinds of challenges."
AI Governance Platforms
Gartner also recommended that organizations deploy AI governance platforms. Those platforms can create, manage, and enforce policies for the responsible use of AI, explain the workings of AI systems and provide the transparency needed for trust and accountability, it said.
Gartner also predicted that those organizations using comprehensive AI governance platforms will experience 40% fewer AI-related ethical incidents than those that did not have such systems by 2028.
Without a doubt, AI governance is the key to avoiding ethics incidents because it brings structure and accountability to AI development and deployment, said Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research in Las Vegas.
With well-defined policies and frameworks, organizations can ensure their AI systems are fair, transparent, and free of bias, he told TechNewsWorld.
Governance platforms also assist in monitoring and auditing AI behavior, thus helping in the early detection and redress of potential risks. Without governance, organizations are at more risk of discriminatory outcomes, privacy violations, and non-compliance with regulatory requirements, " he added.
Dealing with Misinformation
Gartner also predicted that more organizations will invest in disinformation security. The research company projected that, by 2028, 50% of enterprises would begin using products, services, or features designed explicitly to address the use cases of disinformation security, a number that would jump from less than 5% today.
"Disinformation fuels bad decisions, and it's particularly problematic for AIs," said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
"The AIs will be making decisions on this bad information much faster, making it nearly impossible for humans to enforce post-decision mitigation," he told TechNewsWorld. "Thus solving the disinformation problem becomes even more critical for AIs than it is with humans."
"That is partly because such false information spreads very fast and can lead public distrust, damaging enterprise through inflicting negative reputation," says Vena.
It may also cause financial losses since the disinformation breaks the business, influences prices of stocks, or deceives customers," he said.
"More to that," he added, "disinformation may provide security loopholes since it has the ability to influence employees therefore creating poor decisions or increase the chances of social engineering attacks."
Postquantum Cryptography
Postquantum cryptography also should appear on organizations' radar in 2025. Advances in quantum computing are likely to break several forms of traditional cryptography that are currently widely used, Gartner said. It predicted that through quantum computing advances, by 2029 most traditional asymmetric cryptography will become unsafe to use.
"I fully agree with Gartner on this," said Florian Neukart, chief product officer at Terra Quantum, a quantum as a service provider in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
"That, to me, makes 2029 quite realistic," he told TechNewsWorld about a prediction for that year.
"Traditional asymmetric cryptography, such as RSA and ECC, are vulnerable to a quantum attack, like Shor's algorithm, which will break such systems. Companies should start their transition to post-quantum cryptographic solutions immediately. Changing cryptographic methods takes considerable lead time so that sensitive data is not compromised in a quantum future."
The important date, however, is not the date of the prediction by Gartner but the date that organizations should start taking the threat seriously, "said Duncan Jones, head of cybersecurity at Quantinuum, an international quantum computing hardware and software company. "And that date has already passed," he told TechNewsWorld.
Neuromancer by 2030?
Another strategic technology of Gartner is neurological enhancement. It claims that the tech will have tremendous scope in the following three aspects: human upskilling, next-generation marketing, and performance. Neurological enhancement will elevate cognitive capabilities, allow brands to understand what consumers think and feel, and escalate human neural abilities for better outcomes, it observed.
It said that by 2030, 30% of knowledge workers will depend on and be enhanced by technologies including bidirectional brain-machine interfaces. Enderle disagreed with the Gartner forecast. "The technology's still pretty limited and still requires a level of training for just reading the brain that won't scale," he said.
"Feeding information back into the brain hasn't been sorted yet, at least not publicly," he explained. "Given the lack of progress here, I think the 2030 prediction is unreliable."
"However," he continued, "AI is speeding up a significant amount of development in this area, making it at least possible, if not probable, that this prediction will be accurate."
"When bidirectional information can flow from and to a brain using these brain-machine interfaces, that will be the true beginning of the Singularity, but given where the technology now is, any timeline would be little more than a slightly educated guess."
Other strategic technologies on Gartner's list included:
Ultra-low cost, small smart tags and sensors will cause more ambient invisible intelligence to be applied so that sensing and intelligence are deeply integrated in most daily life.
Growth of energy-efficient computing with several new compute technologies to emerge for special purpose tasks like AI and optimization, so by the late 2020s many of these special purpose tasks-like AI and optimization-will consume much less energy.
Hybrid computing with increased focus on transformative innovation that is far more efficient than traditional environments.
Spatial computing to augment the real world with more reality in it, giving a boost to the market towards US$1.7 trillion by 2033.
Increased polyfunctional robots, meaning they can accomplish more than one thing at a time, to achieve by 2030 the level where, every day, 80 percent of people will interact with a smart robot.
Comments