The best IT technology predictions – 2025 edition

How will the technology sector change over the next 12 months?

New technologies and a changing political landscape cloud the future, but Computer science is here to sweep away uncertainty.

Here’s the Computing editorial team’s predictions for what the next 12 months will bring for the tech industry.

AI will become more targeted – and more useful

This year, concerns have grown about the massive amount of training data that AI language models need to do their work. To plausibly answer questions ranging from what an election candidate stands for to how to make tomato soup, large language models (LLMs) need petabytes of information as a basis.

But what about narrower use cases? What if you just want to use AI to detect cracks in concrete or learn about the latest developments in the IT industry? What if your data was confidential?

Enter small language models (SLMs), which are trained on a much smaller subset of data (the clue is in the name) – for example, images of cracks in concrete. These models bring AI to the edge of the network to empower IoT and can be tailored to a specific industry to meet niche requirements and recognize jargon.

Since most SLMs are built privately, for a specific company, training data is kept in-house – so there are fewer privacy concerns.

SLMs started to take off this year, but in 2025 this growth will explode, especially since multiple SLMs can be used together in a toolchain.

IT leaders also told us this year that they weren’t seeing the ROI they expected from AI, but vendors continue to invest money in the technology, so we expect SLMs to evolve quickly. Additionally, AI trials will move from experimentation to monetization.

genAI requirements and planned data center developments in the UK are likely to bring more public attention to data center energy consumption in 2025.

This is a good thing, because so far the only people who are really interested in this sort of thing are usually journalists and technology or sustainability researchers (and perhaps those who oppose building data centers in their neighborhoods).

However, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the updated EU Energy Efficiency Directive are likely to enable businesses to better understand their digital carbon footprint. It’s not the same as reducing it, but it’s a start.

In the United States, changes are expected in climate reporting in California (where most tech giants are headquartered) and many initiatives from AWS and Microsoft aim to reduce embodied emissions from centers of data. Examples include a wooden data center pilot from Microsoft and a greater focus on reuse and refurbishment from AWS.

Smaller players in the data center industry are also focusing on sustainability, and some specialist technologists like Deep Green and atNorth are innovating to reuse the heat generated by data centers and channel it where it is needed.

These initiatives are all happening because businesses and financiers are becoming more interested in the environmental impact of digitalization. Although data center emissions will not decline in the short or even medium term, they will likely increase more slowly than they would have if companies had not been encouraged by governments and regulators to try to measure the impact of their digitalization.

If this continues to shape the strategy of data-intensive enterprises and the cloud/data center sector in 2025, so much the better.

Arrival of a long-promised bill

This does not require a crystal ball, since it is scheduled for early 2025: the highly anticipated British AI bill will be presented.

Nor is it necessary to say that the UK will seek to position itself within its traditional comfort zone, between the prescriptive, risk-based approach of the EU and… whatever comes out of the US .

This last point leads me (and perhaps Whitehall officials) to research the magical runes, because who knows what they will be? The Republican instinct will be to deregulate, but companies are looking for certainty around AI, and the laws provide for it. Trump could decide to pit favored companies and countries against less favored ones, with favorites changing on a whim based on their perceived loyalty.

The runes tell me that the UK will move closer to the larger, more predictable European market, while leaving as many options open as possible – but I bought them cheaply from Runes4U and can’t vouch for their reliability .

Big Tech disruptions take a back seat

Staying in the United States, the new administration will likely return to measures to break up tech giants like Apple and Google under antitrust law, if only for measures advanced under the Biden administration. Trump has already said that China is afraid of Google, which would be another reason.

Action has already been taken against attempts to impose net neutrality among carriers, so this would amount to much the same thing. Big Tech will get even bigger.

AI will appear in PC refresh cycles

With a standard laptop/desktop refresh cycle lasting 3-5 years on average, and most companies taking the opportunity to do their last mass refresh in the years before the Windows pandemic 11, 2025 heralds the start of the next great cycle. And this time, it’s all about PC AI.

AI PCs are those that can run AI processes natively in the background, without affecting normal execution speed. While Microsoft would have you think that these devices need a Copilot key, the only requirement is actually the inclusion of a neural processing unit (NPU).

Opinions among IT managers on the usability of AI are still mixed, and we don’t expect AI PCs to update themselves – meaning most users won’t replace a PC in perfect condition simply to benefit from the AI ​​functionalities. But many IT managers are likely to future-proof their fleet and choose a PC with AI capabilities when the inevitable refresh cycle begins, especially as operating systems and applications begin to leverage the NPU.

For now, AI PCs remain premium devices, so don’t expect enterprise-wide adoption except in a few niche cases; it’s more likely that we’ll see a few teams acquire these newer PCs and then spread to the rest of the company as prices drop.

DEI will evolve – quietly

2024 has not been a good year for DEI. “Wake up, go broke” has been the motto of activists who have targeted companies like Bud Lite and Disney for their publicly progressive policies.

Right-wing critics have successfully misrepresented DEI as responsible for everything from a bridge collapse in Baltimore to the Crowdstrike outage to the attempt on Donald Trump’s life this summer. The latter won the American popular vote while presenting Kamala Harris as a “diversity hire”.

Those who deliberately distort and misrepresent DEI have been ably aided by the ranks of the most vocal identity politics enthusiasts and lazy woke DEI businesses.

So, will 2025 be the year DEI does the right thing and dies?

I’m not so sure. While the current backlash against DEI puts some of the most egregious examples of woke washing in business to shame, that’s not a bad thing. DEI as marketing does not make organizations more diverse, more equitable, or more inclusive. There’s also no need to require everyone to complete unconscious bias training and declare their pronouns on their email signatures.

More sensible technology organizations will continue to quietly “do the work” on DEI. Many work hard to find talent from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds and strive to implement family-friendly policies that improve employee retention.

Bjg Tech may be screaming RTO mandates, but most tech employers will continue to quietly operate a hybrid model because it suits them and their employees,

The DEI industry has been complicit in its own failure by going too far and losing sight of its original goals. There are many ways to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce. This needs management support, sponsorship, a moderate tone, time and great good faith. More light, less heat.

DEI will not die in 2025. It will evolve quietly and will probably be more successful as a result.