Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025

Theme 1: AI‘s Urgency and Risks

Agentic AI can plan and take actions to achieve user-defined goals.

Figure 1: Notice the gap in Agentic AI

1. Definition

Agentic AI refers to software programs designed to make independent decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. These programs combine various AI technologies with functionalities such as memory, planning, environmental perception, tool usage, and adherence to safety guidelines to autonomously execute tasks to achieve objectives.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2028, at least 15% of daily work decisions will be autonomously made by Agentic AI, compared to just 0% in 2024.

3. Use Cases

(1) Enable employees to develop and manage more complex technology projects through natural language, whether micro-automation or large projects;

(2) Achieve customer experience automation by making highly calculated decisions at every step using data analytics;

(3) Transform decision-making and enhance organizational situational awareness through faster data analysis and intelligent forecasting.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits: Virtual employees composed of Agentic AI can assist and enhance the work of humans or traditional applications.

Challenges: Strong protective measures are needed to ensure alignment with the intentions of providers and users.

Technological solutions that enable organizations to manage the legal, ethical, and operational performance of their AI systems.

Figure 2: Elements of AI Governance Platforms

1. Definition

AI Governance Platforms help manage and control AI systems to ensure they are used responsibly and ethically. Through these platforms, IT leaders can ensure that AI is reliable, transparent, fair, and accountable, while also adhering to safety and ethical standards. This ensures that AI aligns with the organization’s values and broader societal expectations.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2028, companies using AI Governance Platforms will have customer trust scores 30% higher than their competitors and regulatory compliance scores 25% higher.

3. Use Cases

(1) Assess potential risks and harms that AI systems may pose, such as bias, privacy violations, and negative social impacts;

(2) Guide AI models through model management processes, ensuring adherence to all appropriate checkpoints and controls throughout the model lifecycle;

(3) Track usage, monitor AI system performance, audit decision-making processes, and ensure AI systems remain compliant with governance standards over the long term.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits: Create, manage, and enforce policies to ensure responsible AI use, explain how AI systems work, establish lifecycle management models, and provide transparency to build trust and accountability.

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

Aimed at systematically discerning trustworthy emerging technology categories.

Figure 3: What is Disinformation Security?

1. Definition

The purpose of Disinformation Security is to help identify which content is trustworthy, aiming to create systems that ensure information accuracy, verify authenticity, prevent impersonation, and monitor the spread of harmful content.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2028, 50% of enterprises will adopt products, services, or features specifically targeting disinformation security use cases, compared to under 5% in 2024.

3. Use Cases

(1) Detect the use of synthetic media within authorized scopes (verification of identity, real-time communication, or claim verification);

(2) Conduct intelligence monitoring of statements spread through mass media or social media, such as comments directed at executive teams, products, services, or brands;

(3) Prevent impersonation of individuals associated with the organization, such as employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits: Reduce fraud by strengthening identity verification controls; prevent account takeover through continuous risk scoring, situational awareness, and adaptive trust models; protect brand reputation by identifying harmful narratives.

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

Theme 2:New Realms of Computing

Data protection resistant to quantum computing decryption risks.

Figure 4: Cryptographic Flexibility Timeline

1. Definition

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) refers to cryptographic methods designed to counter potential threats posed by quantum computers.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2029, advancements in quantum computing technology will render most traditional asymmetric cryptographic techniques insecure.

3. Use Cases

(1) Future-proof systems that ensure sensitive financial data remains secure even in a quantum computing world;

(2) Protect valuable intellectual property from cyber threats, including future quantum attacks, ensuring competitors or hackers cannot decrypt confidential information;

(3) Ensure encrypted information, contracts, and operational data are not intercepted or decrypted by quantum adversaries.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits: Protect data from security risks arising after the advent of quantum computing.

Challenges: PQC algorithms cannot directly replace existing asymmetric algorithms. Current applications may face performance issues, requiring testing and potentially needing to be rewritten.

Enhancing sustainability through more efficient architectures, code, and algorithms; optimized hardware for efficiency; and using renewable energy to power systems.

Figure 6: Controlling Sustainability in Information Technology

1. Definition

Energy-efficient computing refers to minimizing energy consumption and carbon emissions in the design and operation of computers, data centers, and other digital systems.

2. Gartner Prediction

Today, the primary concern for most IT organizations is carbon emissions.

3. Use Cases

(1) Reduce data center costs by lowering the energy consumption of servers and cooling systems;

(2) Sustainable product development: design products with lower energy consumption using energy-efficient computing;

(3) Use intelligent power management systems to reduce energy consumption across the entire office network.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits:Respond to legal, business, and social pressures by improving sustainability through reduced carbon emissions.

Challenges:Requires new hardware, cloud services, skills, tools, algorithms, and applications; migrating to new computing platforms is complex and costly; energy prices may rise in the short term due to increased demand for green energy.

Combining different computing, storage, and networking mechanisms to solve computing problems.

Figure 7: A Simplified Hybrid Computing Architecture

1. Definition

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

2. Gartner Prediction

Future organizations will run their core, sensitive applications on local servers while leveraging cloud computing for high-performance tasks such as data analytics, AI, or backup storage. This hybrid setup will enable businesses to scale efficiently, optimize costs, and maintain flexibility.

3. Use Cases

(1) Cost-effective scalability: retain critical workloads internally for security while utilizing cloud processing for peak loads during busy seasons;

(2) Enhance data security and compliance: store sensitive data internally to meet stringent data privacy regulations while using the cloud for less sensitive operations or analytics;

(3) Accelerate innovation and development: leverage cloud-based development tools while maintaining a secure internal environment for production maintenance.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits:An efficient, fast, transformative innovation environment; AI that surpasses current technological limits; autonomous businesses driven by higher automation levels; enhanced human capabilities enabling large-scale real-time personalization.

Challenges:Emerging, highly complex technologies require specialized skills; autonomous modular systems pose security risks; experimental technologies and high costs involved; coordination and integration are necessary.

Theme 3:Human-Machine Collaboration

Utilizing technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality to digitally enhance the physical world, providing immersive experiences.

Figure 8: Three Levels of Implementing Spatial Computing

1. Definition

Spatial computing enhances the functionality of the physical world by anchoring digital content in reality, allowing users to interact with it in an immersive, realistic, and intuitive manner.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2028, 20% of people will have an immersive experience at least once a week, compared to less than 1% in 2023.

3. Use Cases

(1) Collaborate with teams in immersive 3D environments, making remote meetings more interactive and effective;

(2) Create lifelike simulated scenarios for employee training to simulate practical learning, lowering training costs and risks while enhancing skill mastery and retention;

(3) Guide store purchasing decisions through interactive virtual assistants, improving shopping experiences and increasing engagement and sales.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits:Meet consumer demands for immersive and interactive experiences in gaming, education, and e-commerce; satisfy the needs for advanced visualization tools in healthcare, retail, and manufacturing to improve decision-making and efficiency.

Challenges:Head-mounted displays are expensive, bulky, require frequent charging, may isolate users, and can increase the likelihood of accidents; complex user interfaces; data privacy and security are major concerns.

Robots capable of performing multiple tasks and seamlessly switching between different tasks as needed.

Figure 9: Polyfunctional Robots: A New Wave of Physical Innovation

1. Definition

Polyfunctional robots are machines capable of performing multiple tasks based on human instructions or examples, designed and operated flexibly.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2030, 80% of people will interact with intelligent robots daily, compared to less than 10% currently.

3. Use Cases

(1) Handle multiple tasks in warehouse environments, such as sorting, packaging, and transporting goods;

(2) Assist in healthcare by performing various tasks, such as delivering medical supplies, assisting patients with mobility, and even conducting space disinfection;

(3) On-site services, inspecting equipment, performing routine maintenance, and repairing faults in remote or hazardous environments.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits:Improve efficiency; faster return on investment; rapid deployment with low risk and high scalability without changing infrastructure or installing new systems; capable of replacing humans or working alongside them.

Challenges:The industry has yet to reach a consensus on pricing or minimum functional requirements.

Utilizing technologies that read and decode brain activity to enhance cognitive abilities.

Figure 10: How Brain-Machine Interface Functions Will Evolve

1. Definition

Neurological enhancement refers to the process of enhancing human cognitive abilities through technologies that read and decode brain activity and selectively write to the brain.

2. Gartner Prediction

By 2030, 60% of IT employees will be enhanced and rely on technologies such as bidirectional brain-machine interfaces (BBMIs).

3. Use Cases

(1) Shorten surgical residency by a full year;

(2) Provide personalized teaching materials to students in real-time;

(3) Reduce workplace injuries and industrial disasters;

(4) Improve hiring and retention efforts by identifying matching colleagues through neural data.

4. Business Benefits and Challenges

Business Benefits: Enhance human skills, improve safety, personalize education, extend the working hours of the elderly, etc.

Challenges: Initially expensive, limited battery life, limited mobility and wireless connection options; invasive and risky; BBMIs directly connect to the human brain, posing safety challenges; ethical issues (such as altering users’ perception of reality).