Top 5 Tech Predictions for 2025

SENIOR CONTENT writer, Andela

CHRISTINE WONG

WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR ENTERPRISE TECH IN 2025?

Time magazine took a shot at that question back in 2015, peering into its crystal ball to predict what technology would look like 10 years later. It boldly forecast that in 2025, “everything from cars to coffee cups will be connected to the Internet” and that “the ever-increasing hunger for data will fundamentally change the way we live our lives over the next decade.” Now that 2025 is actually here, those prognostications seem like quaint understatements in a world where bots generate nearly half of all global Internet traffic and 500 million people use ChatGPT every month. Technology is moving faster than ever. To help your organization stay on top of it — and derive the most business value from it — here are five pivotal tech predictions for the year ahead.

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Intro

Mission Statement

Services

How We Work

Next Steps

The Team

the push for autonomous, sustainable ai

AI will require less handholding by humans in 2025, moving further towards fulfilling business goals rather than simply completing tasks. The key to this trend is agentic AI, defined by Gartner as software-based systems that “autonomously plan and take actions to meet user-defined goals.” Cue the rise of virtual AI agents, which enhance the work of human beings while lightening their overall workload.

Per Deloitte, “these AI agents will offer greater flexibility, and a wider array of use cases compared to traditional machine learning or deep learning methods.” All of that will simplify things for the human workforce, right? Not immediately; preparation for the deployment of AI agents requires vast organizational change. In IDC’s words, “the need to automate will create an AI-driven workplace transformation, evolving the employment journey life cycle.”

By 2028, at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously by agentic AI, up from 0 percent in 2024. (Gartner)

25 percent of all enterprises using generative AI will deploy AI agents in 2025, doubling to 50 percent by 2027. (Deloitte)

47 percent of IT and LOB leaders have already made changes to work practices and policies to pave the way for automation and an AI-driven workforce. (IDC)

The march towards autonomous AI doesn’t completely push humans out of the picture, however.

says Courtney Machi, Vice President of Product and Engineering at Andela. “The fear over AI taking jobs is real, and companies that attempt to ‘automate the workers’ will find workers that won’t help them, notes The McKinsey At The Edge Podcast. Instead, winning companies will use AI and automation to complement and extend human abilities, creating ‘shared prosperity,’ as McKinsey notes, and will elevate the worker experience with new skills and higher quality work.” What about the push for sustainability? Artificial intelligence consumes enormous amounts of energy and computing power. A single ChatGPT query uses about 10 times more electricity than the average Google Search, according to the International Energy Agency. This energy-gobbling trend shows no sign of slowing down in 2025.

Driven mainly by GenAI usage, global data centers will consume four percent of all electricity by 2030, doubling their current consumption rate. (Deloitte)

For businesses, AI isn’t just driving up energy consumption and utility costs; it’s also generating huge amounts of e-waste in an era when ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues are among the top priorities for corporate boards. Training just one LLM generates the same amount of C02 emissions as 315 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco, according to scientists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2025, we’ll see a move toward more energy efficient computing with less impact on the environment. In Gartner’s view, this will include “more efficient (IT) architecture, code and algorithms, hardware optimized for efficiency, and the use of renewable energy to run systems.” Deloitte expects major tech firms to funnel investment into carbon-free energy sources, new cooling solutions, more efficient chips, and energy-efficient design. Deloitte adds a caveat, however, that these greener efforts “are expected to take years to yield tangible results and return on investment.” Andela CEO Carrol Chang predicts remote work will be an important piece of the sustainability conversation, with 36.2 million Americans (14 percent of the adult population) forecast to be working remotely this year.

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Cloud (like pretty much everything else in tech) will be shaped in 2025 by the continuing rise of AI. “The use of AI technologies in IT and business operations is unabatedly accelerating the role of cloud computing in supporting business operations and outcomes,” Gartner noted in its 2025 cloud forecast. This will drive further spending on hybrid and public cloud over the next few years.

AI FUELS HYBRID AND PUBLIC CLOUD USE

90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud through 2027. (Gartner)

Worldwide spending on public cloud services (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and Desktop-as-a-Service combined) will hit $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024. (Gartner)

During the KubeCon NA 2024 conference in Salt Lake City, an entire day of sessions was devoted to platform engineering, with one attendee dubbing it “Ops in a trench coat.” Why all the buzz? With AI amping up IT complexity, everyone’s looking for ways to streamline application development, which has become mired in a sprawl of disparate tools that make it tough to:

platform engineering streamlines development

An image of the Diagram of Platform Engineering from Gartner.

Under Gartner’s model of platform engineering, an organization builds and operates its own internal system of self-service platforms to simplify and speed up the development process through a combination of:

Skillsoft brought the situation into even sharper focus by releasing a survey of more than 5,000 IT decision makers in November 2024. It revealed 65 percent of organizations currently have skills gaps on their teams, with 56 percent expecting those gaps to continue over the next one to two years. To no one’s surprise, finding AI and ML talent is a persistent thorn in the side of those same organizations, who told Skillsoft their top three investment priorities for 2025 are:

By 2026, the IT skills crisis will be felt by 90 percent of organizations worldwide and cause $5.5 trillion in collective losses due to product delays, loss of business, and hindered competitiveness. (IDC)

According to IDC, the 10 most wanted tech skills in 2025 and beyond will include these three:

To take advantage of all these tech trends in 2025, you need the right talent with the right skills. But those two ingredients could be in short supply if the following predictions come true.

THE TECH TALENT HUNT GOES BORDERLESS

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More entry level tasks will be absorbed by AI co-pilots and other tools. But the 'human+AI' equation ultimately wins,

The shift toward remote work will continue in 2025 — with significant implications for corporate sustainability efforts,

says Chang. “Research shows remote workers in the US cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 54 percent by not commuting to an office five days a week. As companies push hard to hit sustainability goals, the impact of remote work will increasingly impact reportable numbers.”

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Drilling down into specifics, Gartner predicts the most urgent GenAI challenge necessary to address over the next year will be data synchronization across the hybrid cloud environment.

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A centralized repository of knowledge shared and expanded by development talent for consistency, quality, efficiency, security, and compliance

Platform services (ranging from databases to ML APIs) provided in a PaaS environment

Integrated developer environments and testing suites

Reusable software components that scale up or down as needed

Integrated developer environments and testing suites

Platform services (ranging from databases to ML APIs) provided in a PaaS environment

A centralized repository of knowledge shared and expanded by development talent for consistency, quality, efficiency, security, and compliance

Find talent with the skills and knowledge required to work with so many different tools and systems

Manage bloated tool costs among various vendors

Adhere to compliance and security best practices

Enforce consistent coding policies

47%

AI/ML

42%

Cybersecurity and Information Security

36%

Cloud Computing

To fill these gaps, companies will look for talent globally and to fulfill short- or long-term needs,

As this situation worsens, companies will go to increasingly innovative lengths to find, hire, train, manage, and retain talent in 2025.

says Alvaro Oliveira, Chief Talent Officer at Andela. That means companies recruiting talent beyond geographic borders, tapping into pools of talent they haven’t explored yet. Gartner describes this phenomenon as “talent working remotely from different countries based on an employment contract made across national borders.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated borderless hiring, and what began as an exception, is no longer.

Gabriela Vogel Senior Director Analyst, Gartner CIO Research at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022 in Barcelona

Conclusion

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Conclusion

Andela can expand your talent pool to 150,000 top-rated technologists in 175 countries, specializing in Application Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Cloud, Data & Analytics, and Product & Design. The AI-powered Andela Talent Cloud matches companies with the best engineering talent for their evolving needs, up to 70 percent faster than traditional hiring methods and at 30 to 50 percent less cost. Onboarding takes days instead of months, while projects move forward 33 percent faster.

The global skills gap is now a gaping canyon, one that's simply too big to ever close with the same old recruiting and hiring methods. Work has been forever redefined, and its geographic borders haven’t just been redrawn — they've been knocked down completely. It’s fitting to conclude here by talking about talent and skills; without those two things, no organization can get full business value out of all the other predictions we’ve highlighted.

Andela pioneered Adaptive Hiring, a borderless, flexible, scalable way to hire qualified, vetted technical talent.

If you haven’t embraced borderless, Adaptive Hiring yet, there’s a good chance your competitors already have.

To be ready for 2025 (and beyond), contact Andela to explore Adaptive Hiring.

88%

of enterprise companies want to find tech talent in other countries (Andela)

58%

of organizations employed tech talent in a borderless, fully remote way in 2022, double the amount in 2019, with a further 27 percent also exploring it in 2022 (Gartner)

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Companies will also set their sights on sorting out the ROI of AI in 2025. They’ll hunt for ways to identify, measure, track, and optimize the business value of the AI investments and activities they’ve undertaken in the two years since ChatGPT made its game changing public debut. “Are businesses seeing the ROI they expected from AI adoption? Some businesses absolutely are,” says Machi. “Companies who have been able to cut costs due to automation of previously human-driven tasks, or who have been able to grow top line due to differentiated product are reaping the benefits. Again, it goes back to whether or not companies are willing to invest time up front and willingness to take risk to some degree.” IDC says the shift from “AI experimentation to AI monetization” will seek to pinpoint the costs, usage, and effectiveness of AI throughout the organization in a detailed, automated way. Think FinOps, but for AI instead of cloud. IDC suggests a tool that could help with that in 2025: the unified platform for composite AI. As IDC describes it, each company could create its own “holistic, coordinated platform” with the foundational technology and workflows in place to scale up AI-based solutions across the entire organization. Again, the idea is to evolve AI beyond basic task-based productivity toward strategic business value.

By 2025, organizations that adopt comprehensive AI governance platforms will suffer 40 percent fewer AI-related ethical incidents than companies without such platforms. (Gartner)

according to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025.

These technology solutions have the capability to create, manage and enforce policies for responsible AI use, explain how AI systems work, and provide transparency to build trust and accountability,

In 2025, those worries may come to fruition, according to Forrester analysts. They predict that in 2025 “the European Union will fine a GenAI provider for the first time under the EU AI Act.” That’s because the EU will start enforcing specific parts of the Act in February and June of 2025, including requirements around the disclosure of training sources, model evaluations, and adversarial testing. Amid that tightening regulatory backdrop, Gartner expects more enterprise organizations to adopt AI governance platforms in 2025. These solutions will be set up to manage the ethical, legal and operational aspects of a company’s AI systems by baking elements of trust and responsibility right into them.

56 percent of Fortune 500 companies cited AI as a risk factor for their business in their 2024 annual reports. (Financial Times)

Concerns about AI ethics, compliance, and liability continued to keep executives awake at night in 2024.

greater focus on ai governance and ai economics

AI IT Operations Cloud (including cloud architecture and cloud-based data management and storage)

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