Gartner’s 2025 Strategic Technology Trends Report provides valuable insights for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other senior IT leaders, aimed at helping businesses anticipate and respond to future technological challenges and opportunities. The report identifies and elaborates on ten strategic technology trends with disruptive potential, which can not only drive innovation but also help businesses navigate a changing commercial landscape while focusing on ethical responsibility and trust. These trends cover areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine collaboration, the future of quantum computing, emerging computing technologies, and how to balance technological innovation with social responsibility.
Through in-depth analysis across various industries, Gartner summarizes the ten major strategic technology trends for 2025, covering areas such as AI, computing frontiers, and human-machine collaboration.
1. Agentic AI
Trend Background: Agentic AI refers to software programs that can make autonomous decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. This technology combines various AI techniques, possessing capabilities such as memory, planning, environmental perception, tool usage, and adherence to safety protocols, aiming to enhance the autonomy of AI systems.
Trend Importance: Agentic AI can significantly boost productivity within organizations, automating at least 15% of daily work decisions by 2028. It enables employees to tackle more complex tasks, propels the development of technology projects, and improves decision-making efficiency.
Application Scenarios: This technology can be used for customer experience automation, advanced decision-making in data analytics, and autonomous planning for complex projects.
2. AI Governance Platforms
Trend Background: With the widespread application of AI across various fields, ensuring its reliability, transparency, and fairness during use has become increasingly important. AI governance platforms provide tools for enterprises to supervise and manage AI systems, ensuring compliance with ethical standards and regulatory requirements.
Trend Importance: AI governance platforms can reduce the risks of bias and privacy violations, while also enhancing customer trust and regulatory compliance. By 2028, companies adopting AI governance platforms are expected to achieve 30% higher customer trust ratings.
Application Scenarios: These platforms can help enterprises monitor the decision-making processes of AI systems, ensuring fairness and tracking the performance and potential social impacts of AI systems.
3. Disinformation Security
Trend Background: Disinformation security aims to help businesses identify credible information and prevent impersonation, online fraud, and the spread of false messages. With the widespread use of generative AI and machine learning tools, businesses face increasingly severe threats from information manipulation and cyberattacks.
Trend Importance: As tools for spreading disinformation advance, businesses need to leverage new security systems to protect the authenticity of information and prevent impersonation. By 2028, 50% of enterprises are expected to adopt security products targeting disinformation.
Application Scenarios: Disinformation security tools can be used to identify deep fakes, monitor the spread of false information in media and social networks, and prevent identity impersonation of employees or customers.
4. Post-Quantum Cryptography
Trend Background: With the development of quantum computing, existing encryption methods will gradually become ineffective, posing potential threats to data security within the next decade. Therefore, businesses need to adopt post-quantum cryptography to address future quantum computing threats.
Trend Importance: To prevent the threat of “collecting now, decrypting later,” businesses need to plan and implement new encryption technologies in advance to ensure the protection of sensitive data in the quantum computing era.
Application Scenarios: Post-quantum cryptography can be applied in financial data, intellectual property protection, and encrypted communications to ensure future security.
5. Ambient Invisible Intelligence
Trend Background: Ambient invisible intelligence involves using low-cost sensors and tags to track the status of objects and environments, with this data being sent to the cloud for analysis and recording. This technology will gradually be embedded in everyday items, often unnoticed by users.
Trend Importance: As the costs of sensors and tags decrease, businesses can gain real-time insights into supply chains, warehousing, and employee usage of spaces, thereby improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Application Scenarios: Retailers can use this technology to automatically adjust lighting and product recommendations based on customer behavior, manufacturers can monitor equipment status in real-time, and healthcare can achieve continuous patient monitoring without relying on wearable devices.
6. Energy-Efficient Computing
Trend Background: Energy-efficient computing refers to designing and operating computers, data centers, and other digital systems to minimize energy consumption and carbon footprints. With the increasing energy consumption of technologies like AI, businesses need to rely on new computing technologies for significant energy efficiency improvements over the next five to ten years.
Trend Importance: By adopting energy-efficient computing technologies, businesses can not only reduce operational costs but also achieve more sustainable product designs, thereby minimizing environmental impacts.
Application Scenarios: Data centers can reduce costs by optimizing the energy consumption of servers and cooling systems, while office networks can implement smart power management systems to lower overall energy consumption.
7. Hybrid Computing
Trend Background: Hybrid computing combines various technologies such as CPUs, GPUs, edge devices, and quantum systems to create a mixed environment that leverages the advantages of different technologies to help businesses tackle complex computing problems.
Trend Importance: Hybrid computing helps businesses effectively utilize emerging technologies to address data security, regulatory compliance, and cost control issues, fostering innovation and development.
Application Scenarios: Businesses can run core applications on local servers while leveraging cloud processing for data analytics, AI computations, or backup storage, ensuring flexibility and cost optimization.
8. Spatial Computing
Trend Background: Spatial computing allows users to interact with digital content anchored in the physical world in an immersive way. Advances in augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and AI technologies have driven this trend.
Trend Importance: With the proliferation of 5G and new devices (such as Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3), spatial computing has vast application prospects in gaming, healthcare, and e-commerce.
Application Scenarios: Companies can use digital twin technology to create real-time 3D digital models to monitor and optimize the performance of physical assets, while retailers can enhance shopping experiences through interactive virtual assistants.
9. Polyfunctional Robots
Trend Background: Polyfunctional robots are capable of performing multiple tasks, designed and operated flexibly to enhance efficiency across various industries. With rising labor costs and the proliferation of advanced robotic technologies, this technology shows immense application potential in warehousing and manufacturing.
Trend Importance: Polyfunctional robots can perform various tasks based on demand, promoting labor efficiency improvements and higher returns on investment for businesses.
Application Scenarios: These robots can handle picking, packing, and transporting in warehouses, assist patients in healthcare, or perform equipment inspections and maintenance tasks in remote or hazardous environments.
10. Neurological Enhancement
Trend Background: Neurological enhancement technology aims to enhance human cognitive abilities by reading and decoding brain activity, with potential future capabilities for writing to the brain. This technology is expected to revolutionize healthcare and help employees enhance skills and competitiveness.
Trend Importance: Neurological enhancement technology can improve employees’ cognitive abilities and work efficiency through brain interfaces, and can also be used for personalized consumer experiences and optimizing recruitment processes. By 2030, it is expected that 60% of IT workers will rely on neurological enhancement technology to boost work efficiency.
Application Scenarios: This technology can shorten the training time for surgeons, personalize learning materials for students, and reduce workplace accidents and industrial disasters.
Conclusion
Gartner’s 2025 Strategic Technology Trends Report provides IT leaders with a forward-looking blueprint for technological development, helping businesses position themselves favorably in the upcoming technological wave. These trends not only drive technological innovation but also resonate with societal demands for ethics and sustainability. Enterprises need to act swiftly to leverage these technological opportunities to ensure success in future market competition.
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Review: Li Guoqing
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