Once More into the Breach: The TechArena 2025 Predictions Series

Do you hear that sound? The pitter patter of the second half of the decade marching towards us? As we ready ourselves for the close on the first half of this monumental decade, the team at TechArena has been busy exploring those things that have passed, and those yet to come.

As I researched this article, I read back on predictions made in late 2019 about the first half of the decade's advancements. While many predicted AI's continued march, no one called the behemoth that is generative AI and Chat GPT. Many predicted mass advancement of 5G technology, and while 5G proliferation has grown around the globe, we've debated whether its true benefits, such as network slicing and cloud native automation, have been fully delivered.

Others forecasted massive advancements in autonomous driving, and the reality today is far from the 2019 vision. A fearless few called out a rise in remote work. While no one in the mainstream had a global pandemic on their bingo cards, those targeting that trend certainly have much to be proud of.

With this in mind, we dip our toes into the second half of the decade and what's to come. We'll have a series of articles this month from various experts from across the tech landscape weighing in on their relative domains of expertise. To get us started, I'll offer my five top trends for 2025.

1. We'll see the world's first gen AI scandal in 2025: Yes, we did all discuss Air Canada and Scarlett Johansson in 2024, but the tech landscape has not yet seen a major gen AI snafu impacting brands or challenging consumers. With enterprise adoption of AI on the rise in a time of "evolving in real speed" best practices for fine tuning of algorithms, I expect 2025 to usher in a gen AI scandal that will raise the stakes on a broad scale and customer facing adoption.
   
   In the coming weeks, we'll be featuring stories about how the industry is responding to AI safety, and I think these initial efforts will be accelerated in the second half of the decade as more organizations fully realize the value of AI to real business processes, and the threat of inaccurate or uncontrolled adoption of AI agents misrepresenting brands.

2. We'll see a shakeup in the silicon landscape in 2025: Pat Gelsinger's departure at Intel gives us our best shot at completely changing the semi landscape with a breakup or acquisition of the semi giant on many people's minds. But I see broader disruption of the landscape with large cloud players seeking silicon portfolios and talent to lock control of performance advantage in this new accelerator driven computing era. I think we'll see more than one AI accelerator acquisition in 2025, and potentially moves to drive further integration of CPU + Accelerator + connectivity as data center network capability becomes more front-and-center in terms of performance bottlenecks.
   
   
3. We'll be talking about supply chain and sourcing in 2025: With the incoming US administration's focus on tariffs, the complex manufacturing that data center operators rely on will be challenged. While we don't yet know the practical impact of global tariffs, I expect the industry to be challenged with component supply from a very different source than pandemic era shortages. With many manufacturers basing production facilities in Mexico, for example, we may see impact to AI optimized server availability in the US market. And this is, of course, before any potential responding tariffs implemented by other countries in response to US actions.
   
   
4. Agentic AI will consume our conversations in 2025: Agentic computing represents the next wave of gen AI adoption, and this form will drive increased automation of work and decisions into the enterprise. While we started discussing agentic computing this year, I expect many enterprises to begin pilots of agent deployments next year, similar to initial gen AI pilots over the past two years. And while we may share a top level vision of what agentic AI promises, the implementation and compute models deployed for its delivery will come more fully into focus in 2025.
   
   
5. Spatial computing will garner our attention in 2025: While many have talked about the metaverse and virtual reality taking over the center of computing, the reality has been more modest in this space. I see a more pragmatic approach to augmented reality environments with narrow use cases, such as work collaboration and healthcare, to take center stage in 2025, reflecting the staying power of remote experiences in our society. These spatial computing experiences, driven by actual use case requirements and fueled by AI, will seep into our worlds, re-defining a Teams or Zoom meeting into a fully collaborative experience, and giving visualization tools to everyone from doctors to retail platforms to improve the quality of virtual engagements.

Want to hear more about 2025 and the second half of the decade? Watch this space as TechArena experts chime in over the coming weeks on their insights into what's next in tech. For now, I'd love to hear from you on LinkedIn about your views on what's coming in the new year.