Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025

• The consulting firm regularly puts out a list of what the technological road ahead looks like going forward

• Tracking this year's top strategic tech trends will help CIOs and IT leaders shape the future with responsible innovation.

At its annual IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando this week, Gartner announced its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2025, with advances in artificial intelligence, IoT technologies and quantum computing all making the list.

The event is being held at the Swan and Dolphin Resort welcoming 8,000 attendees, CIOs and senior leaders with 200 exhibitors.

Plan for technologies trending for 2025

Amid the challenges of navigating current social and economic disruptions and trends, future success requires CIOs and other IT leaders to look ahead. The Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025 are the star map you can use to keep your organization forging safely into the future. Each trending technology represents powerful new tools to vanquish productivity, security and innovation obstacles.

Use 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.

Here is the Gartner list of 2025 technology trends:

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.

Agentic AI systems automatically plan to meet the goals of users. Gartner predicts that 15% of work decisions will be made automatically via agentic AI by 2028, growing from none this year.

• 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.

AI governance platforms that are implemented will give organizations 40% fewer AI ethical issues by 2028, Gartner predicts. The platforms are used to manage and enforce policies for responsible AI.

• 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.

Disinformation security will be needed as advanced AI and machine learning tools leveraged for nefarious purposes increase disinformation incidents targeting enterprises. Gartner predicts 50% of enterprises will begin adopting products or services that address disinformation security use cases by 2028.

• 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.

Post-Quantum cryptography, which provides data protection resistant to quantum computing decryption risks, will have advanced so much by 2029 that most conventional asymmetric cryptography will be unsafe to use.

• 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

Ambient invisible intelligence, which is enabled by low-cost, small smart tags and sensors that provide large-scale tracking, will enable a deeper integration of sensing and intelligence into everyday life through 2027.

• 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.

Energy-efficient computing will improve in the late 2020s as new compute technologies, such as optical, neuromorphic and novel accelerators, emerge for special purpose tasks, such as AI and optimization, using significantly less energy.

• 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.

Hybrid computing, which combines compute, storage and network mechanisms for computational problems, will create highly efficient and innovative environments that perform more effectively than those that are conventional.

• 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.

Theme No. 3: Human-machine synergy brings together the physical and digital worlds

Trend 8: Spatial computing: Digitally enhances the physical world using technologies like augmented and virtual reality to offer immersive experiences.

Spatial computing, combining the physical world with technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, will grow to $1.7 trillion, increasing from $110 billion in 2023.

• Business benefits: Addresses consumer demand for immersive and interactive experiences in gaming, education and e-commerce; satisfies demand for sophisticated visualization tools for decision making and efficiency in healthcare, retail and manufacturing.

• Challenges: Head-mounted displays are expensive and unwieldy, require frequent charging, isolate users and may increase the potential for accidents; user interfaces are complex; data privacy and security are major concerns.

Trend 9: Polyfunctional robots: Robots capable of performing multiple tasks and seamlessly switching between them as required.

Polyfunctional robots that can do more than one task are replacing robots designed to perform a single task. By 2030, 80% of humans will engage daily with smart robots, an increase from fewer than 10% today, Gartner predicts.

• Business benefits: Improved efficiency; faster ROI; no need for architectural changes or bolt-down infrastructure means fast deployment, low risk and scalability; can substitute for or work with humans.

• Challenges: The industry hasn’t yet standardized on price or minimum functionality required.

Trend 10: Neurological enhancement: Improving cognitive abilities with technologies that read and decode brain activity.

Neurological enhancements, which read and decode brain activity, are predicted to enhance cognitive abilities and enable brands to know what consumers are thinking. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 30% of knowledge workers will be dependent on technologies to stay relevant with the rise of AI in the workplace.

• Business benefits: Human upskilling, safety improvements, personalized education, allowing older people to work longer, next-generation marketing..

• Challenges: Initially expensive, limited battery and options for mobility and wireless connectivity; invasive and risky; UBMIs and BBMIs interface directly with the human brain, creating security challenges; ethical concerns (e.g., altering users’ perception of reality).