8 minute read
Top Technology Trends That Will Continue To Dominate 2025
By Mmaki Jantjies (PhD)
As we close off the year, let’s take a look at the key technology areas that will continue to dominate the tech sector in 2025. Anticipating these shifts is not only crucial for the companies seeking to remain competitive, but for the policymakers, educators and individuals aiming to adapt to the evolving demands of the future.
Immersive Technologies
While multinational technology companies such as Apple, Meta and Microsoft continue to invest in R&D exploring various spatial technologies, we will continue to see an improvement in technologies seeking to combine the physical and virtual worlds. For example, Meta has extended its partnership with RayBan on fashionable smart glasses aiming to provide better ergonomic experience offerings and still offer users great style. The glasses are generally comfortable, allowing users to make calls, send texts, live-stream and listen to music using Meta AI alongside many other capabilities and features.
In 2025, the rising use of immersive technologies will be stimulated by the reduction in cost of their hardware and increased comfort of devices. Coupled with improving network speeds underlying the experience, more regular device use points toward more universal access to fast speeds from network infrastructure such as fiber and 5G which is required to power up and ensure improved AR and VR experiences without any network lag. Possible applications of these technologies vary from their use as training technologies - especially in areas which are considered dangerous such as mines, oil rigs etc. - to applications in healthcare where, for instance, they can be used to support the rehabilitation process. They can also be used to overlay the user experience in entertainment and sports.
Artificial intelligence
Over the past two years, AI has received increasing attention owing to the accelerated growth of investment in the field. Meanwhile, increased computing power and data availability have enabled algorithmic breakthroughs, allowing the field to attract more investment and talent. With the ability to create new human-like content spanning from images, text and code, generative AI promises to experience higher adoption as various organisations continue to deploy it in a variety of use cases. Next year will see a surge of organisations pushing for enhanced AI adoption, but this time companies will adopt a sharper focus on extracting value for business in 2025.
The key integration of generative AI will be to accelerate innovation and provide bespoke experiences, examples of which are customer service teams making increased use of far more intelligent AI-powered chatbots. These bots are available in multiple languages, including those indigenous to many countries.
They seek to improve personalised experiences of customers, being able to handle routine inquiries in order to allow human call center agents to solve much more complex problems. In transport and logistics, for example, warehouse optimisation is being powered by AI-powered robots that navigate warehouses with precision, autonomously picking and packing orders, optimising storage space and dramatically accelerating fulfillment processes.
Parallel to these innovations, 2025 will see the continuing sharpening of focus on AI governance and related platforms. Here, countries, organisations and society will need to get to grips with the demand for responsible use of both AI technology and data across multiple economic sectors. As we observed locally, South Africa also developed a national AI Policy Framework with private sector organisations developing similar strategies and policies to guide its use in business.
While generative AI technology continues to strengthen, AI systems will go beyond doing single tasks to resemble “a team of specialists” working together. Categorised as “agentic AI”, this new type of AI will essentially give bots the ability to act independently. Think of it like this: instead of just following your commands, agentic AI can figure things out on its own like a detective solving a case. Agentic AI can analyse information, make decisions and take action, all in the name of achieving a specific goal.
We could take another real world example here, imagine a company that uses AI to manage its warehouse. With agentic AI the system would not only track inventory but also predict future demand for products, optimising storage space based on real-time needs, ordering new stock automatically when supplies run low and even controlling how robots move and organise goods within the warehouse. This application is just one example of how agentic AI can make business more efficient and intelligent across a range of industries.
Cybersecurity
With digital transformation remaining a key focus within the 4th industrial revolution, cybersecurity will remain an important investment area in ensuring the security of technology systems and related data. There are various forms of cybersecurity threats which have continued to impact organisations within South Africa, both within the public and private sector. TransUnion is an example of one of the large organisations in South Africa which was impacted by a ransomware cyberattack in 2022 where the attackers demanded $15-million threatening to expose the customer data which it had access to. There were many similar such experiences in 2023 and 2024.
The cyber threat landscape has been further complicated by the rise of AI-powered attacks, cloud vulnerabilities, third-party exposures and insider threats. All of these potentially criminal interventions demand increased vigilance and proactive security measures, and as enterprises integrate AI into various processes so does the growth of AIpowered attacks. Cybercriminals are increasingly using AI to enhance their attacks, making them more difficult to detect and defend against.
AI models themselves may be vulnerable to attacks like data poisoning, model stealing and adversarial examples. Economic sectors such as finance and telcos are predicted to strengthen investments significantly in this area as they seek to counter the risk of cyber threats identified globally. Furthermore, we will see a rise of investment in technologies that address disinformation and deepfakes.
Quantum Computing
It was in the early 1980s when the tech world first glimpsed a few of the theoretical concepts representing the breakthrough of quantum computing. Now potential applications of quantum computing are endless and span diverse fields. In drug discovery, quantum computing can simulate molecular interactions, speeding up the development of new treatments. In material science, quantum computing helps to design advanced materials with superior properties.
Finance also stands to benefit from improved modeling and simulations, while artificial intelligence may see faster training of machine learning models. Moreover, quantum computing could revolutionise cryptography both by breaking existing encryption systems and by enabling the creation of quantumresistant algorithms.
Alongside government initiatives, progress in quantum computing is being fueled by significant investments, much like AI is funded by industry leaders like IBM, Google, Microsoft and Intel. The continued investment in R&D teams focused on quantum computing continues to place it as one of the key dominating technologies of the year to come. Thanks to its unique ability to solve problems that are beyond the capabilities of traditional computers, quantum computing will remain at the forefront of technological innovation. To explain quantum computing in simple terms, imagine navigating a maze.
While a classical computer tests one path at a time, a quantum computer can evaluate every path simultaneously, drastically reducing the time it takes to find the solution. Unlike traditional “bits” of either 0 or 1, this advantage stems from the use of “qubits” which superpose both states simultaneously thanks to the principles of quantum mechanics.
Sustainable Tech
With the advancement of technologies such as AI, we have also seen a parallel increase in hardware and energy demands that power up these technologies. However, a number of nations have continued to endure significant climate change disasters in 2024, prompting the need for investment in green computing and sustainable computing.
Equally, we are seeing Net Zero goals being further adopted by organisations continuing to seek ways to attain them sustainably by promoting investments in green energy innovations as well as innovations that support the circular economy. Growing environmental concerns are causing companies to push for energy-efficient hardware, sustainable software development and responsible data management.
As growing concerns about climate change and resource scarcity drive investments in these areas, the focus will be upon optimising data centres, developing eco-friendly hardware and leveraging AI for environmental monitoring and resource management. The year 2025 thus promises a continued focus on how organisations and societies harness renewable sources of energy such as green hydrogen sources in order to support increasing demand for AI technology.
Dr Mmaki Jantjies is an innovative leader who is passionate about harnessing the power of technology and R&D to drive change. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Information Systems.
