The start of a new year is very promising: new advancements, releases and successes are all in play.
At the same time, the final days of the year provide an ideal vantage point to clearly examine how the past 12 months have gone and use that knowledge to determine which successes are most likely – and which might not come to fruition. .
As 2024 draws to a close, the ITPro The team put together some final thoughts on the biggest trends of the past year and the technologies that could define 2025.
AI continues to drive conversations
Each member of the ITPro The team sees AI as the top focus for the IT industry in 2025, as vendors look to improve the sophistication of generative AI models and C-suites aim for better ROI on AI investments that they have achieved over the last two years.
Jane McCallion, editor-in-chief of ITProclaims that AI will dominate 2025 even without a significant technological breakthrough. This, she explains, is because companies will finally be able to make their AI spending profitable.
“Organizations, after spending money on AI in the abstract, might finally figure out what they actually want to use it for,” McCallion says.
The use of AI Agentsgenerative AI models capable of completing tasks autonomously, with all hyperscalers and major AI vendors having launched their own agentic AI offerings.
“We’ve spent more than a year trying to determine the impact of AI assistants and ‘co-pilots’ on businesses, and how they will support workers,” says Ross Kelly, senior news and analysis editor at the house of ITPro. “With autonomous ‘agents’ taking over for staff in various professions, we could finally see the promised productivity benefits of AI come to fruition.”
For Bobby Hellard, reviews editor at ITPro, PC AI featuring neural processing units (NPUs) have been the flagship technology of 2024. At the same time, he says these are just proven platforms for the real hardware and software changes that AI PCs could bring in 2025 and beyond.
“They’re using AI to improve video call quality or predictive text and translation capabilities – that’s not really the future,” he says. “While 2024 was the year of the AI PC, 2025 must be about adding more useful features and tools.”
The dark horse of 2025
Beyond the obvious trends, the team also looks at underappreciated trends for 2025 – aspects of technological change that might not be apparent to the broader industry at the moment.
ITPro Editor-in-Chief Solomon Klappholz hopes for more work on the ethics and environmental impact of AI in 2025, as more attention is paid to these issues.
“I think people are going to become much more aware of the fact that data centers are popping up all over the world and start to have broader conversations about the energy consumption of AI,” he says.
“These installations often have deleterious impacts on local capacity as they place increased pressure on regional energy networks, and as the tangible effects of climate change continue to put communities at risk, I believe it is time that the The tech industry takes a sober look at how it’s exacerbating the problem, rather than helping it.
George Fitzmaurice, our other editor, adds that it is possible that governments will get involved here, as countries grapple with the immense energy and water costs of hosting data centers.
Beyond energy costs, the infrastructure and data costs associated with AI are staggering. That’s why Kelly is focusing on repatriating cloud workloads, as executives seek private AI, sovereign cloud and reducing overall expenses.
“Even though the big cloud repatriation trend of 2023 hasn’t really gone anywhere, AI could be the motivation behind a new love for on-premises infrastructure,” says Kelly.
A more practical orientation
While each new year brings its share of innovations, each also brings new challenges and failures for certain products and technologies. Asked to choose the trend or technology least likely to survive 2025, the ITPro The team is focusing on even more AI products, alongside a long-standing target derided by the industry.
Fitzmaurice says the hype around AI is unlikely to remain at its current level in 2025, as executives become more familiar with the technology and better understand its real value to their business.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop talking about it, but I hope people start talking about it in a more practical way, focusing on what it can actually bring and what it can actually do.” , he adds.
Klappholz and Hellard cite two specific versions of 2024 AI as products they say will be scaled back or canceled in 2025. For Klappholz, these are Google’s controversial addition AI answers in its default search engine, which was quickly criticized for providing users with dangerous answers to benign questions.
For Hellard, it is Microsoft recall in the line of fire. This is a new Windows feature that combines regular screenshots of users’ screens and AI to let them browse their PC activity for items they saw earlier in the day. Hellard believes this project will be abandoned in 2025 for various reasons.
“It was controversial from the start, repeatedly delayedAnd marred by privacy concerns. This doesn’t sound very interesting either; do you really need the computer to remember exactly what you did at all times? If you forgot where a tab is or what you were looking at on social media, it looks like you’re procrastinating!”
Kelly points to another combination of software and hardware as most likely to fail in 2025: virtual reality.
“It’s safe to say that the metaverse has been slowly dying since big tech turned its attention to generative AI,” Kelly said. “2024 itself was a horrible year for Meta’s Reality Labs division, which released huge losses and experienced job losses.
“With Zuckerberg and Meta leading the way on this front since its inception, the company’s neglect on this front speaks volumes. I’m all for the death of the metaverse dream. Who wants to spend their workdays messing around in VR when you can jump during a Teams call?”