Tracking this year's top strategic tech trends will help CIOs and IT leaders shape the future with responsible innovation.
se the 2025 strategic technology trends to shape the future with responsible innovation
In selecting this year’s 10 top strategic technology trends, Gartner analysts organized them across three themes: AI imperatives and risks, new frontiers of computing and human-machine synergy.
Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselves
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 organizations 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.
Theme No. 2: New frontiers of computing prompt organizations to reconsider how they compute
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 optimized 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 personalization at scale and use of the human body as a computing platform.
Challenges: Nascent, highly complex technologies require specialized skills; a system of autonomous modules introduces security risks; involves experimental technologies and high costs; need for orchestration and integration.
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