“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten” – Bill Gates
Welcome to 2025! While technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace it’s healthy to take a quick look back, reflect and stare into the crystal ball. Below is a condensed recap of my 2024 predictions —what panned out, what didn’t—and a set of new bold forecasts for 2025.
2024 Recap: Quick Hits & Misses
AI moves to through “Rationalization and Normalization”
What Happened: Beyond the monstrous investment in the buildout of GPU cloud farms AI and large language models (LLMs) demonstrated real business impact— helping to streamline enterprise search, improve customer service, accelerating new application development, and streamlining cross-functional workflows. Although we are early days here the speed of progress and investment appetites are leading indicators to the potential here.
Missed Opportunities: Many organizations found that closing AI’s “last mile” (governance, hallucinations, bias mitigation, talent pool) was trickier than expected forcing a reset in budgeting and timeline expectations.
Augmented Reality (AR) starts to show promise in augmenting human capability across key industries
What Happened: One of the most notable advances in AR for 2024 was the integration of generative AI technologies. This combination enhanced the creation of digital worlds, artwork, and realistic characters, making AR experiences more immersive and interactive. With that, we saw the launch of the Apple Vision Pro demonstrating the potential power of AR in our daily lives. We also saw the increased development of haptic gloves and devices that stimulate senses like smell creating more realistic and engaging AR environments
Missed Opportunities: In spite of these launches, consumer adoption was confined to niche applications and hardware limitations around processing power, battery life and heat dissipation. In addition, high development costs drove low content availability.
The DPU/GPU battle heats up
What Happened: The demand for Nvidia GPUs skyrocketed driven by Tech Titans, Hyperscalers, GPU-as-a-Service and Sovereign Cloud AI buildouts. With that we saw competitive GPU/DPU/TPU architectures emerge from AMD, Intel as well as homegrown silicon at AWS, Microsoft, Google and Apple. Beyond AI silicon both NVIDIA and AMD delivered deep software development in their data pipelines and instruction sets as well as a strong pivot to edge analytics.
Missed Opportunities: Storage and data platform rationalization took a backseat to GPU farm investments leading to a potential reckoning as AI models scale into production. In the same vein, data quality and access to electricity emerged as looming challenges to deployment of AI at scale.
The Evolution of the Workplace
What Happened: 2024 saw most enterprises return-to-office and with it a renewed focus on flexibility and moving office space to a more dynamic, people-centric environment focused on productive collaboration, relationship and culture building and faster decision making. With that many enterprises looked at innovative layouts including multi-purpose spaces and a focus on driving a mix of professional and social experiences.
Missed Opportunities: Tensions continued between companies wanting their employees more directly engaged “in the office” and employees concerns around their commute time and work/life balance.
Electricity constraints risk choking off innovation
What Happened: The concept of “running out of electricity” became a legitimate threat for many countries, organizations and industries. To counter the threat, investments in clean energy generation projects, grid modernization and manufacturing indeed increased significantly. In 2024, global energy investment exceeded $3 trillion for the first time, with $2 trillion going to clean energy technologies and infrastructure. In addition, AI projects showed promise in driving better efficiency and resiliency to the grid. Lastly, the reality set in that nuclear fission, and the recommissioning of nuclear power plants, as likely the most viable bridge to the future.
Missed Opportunities: While there was a lot of potential solutions and stop gap measures put in place the reality is that the expected pace of AI buildout and innovation will require exponentially more power than is available today. The execution and buildout of the plans to supply it need to keep pace.
“Purpose” becomes the fuel of work and leadership steps up as the “Amplifier”
What Happened: As all employees looked around and evaluated their happiness at work a “sense of purpose” continued to be a major driving factor. In fact, according to Forbes purpose-driven organizations experienced an annual return on equity averaging 13.1% (which is 9% higher than the S&P 500). In addition, empathetic leadership was a critical enabler of success especially those undergoing transformational change. All organizations are quickly recognizing that employee satisfaction goes beyond the paycheck – it’s about creating an environment where every individual feels valued, understood, and cared for
Missed Opportunities: In spite of these benefits Gallup says that only 41% of all employees can actually connect their jobs to the organizations stated purpose. In addition, leaders continue to struggle with balancing empathy and decision-making, especially in high-pressure situations and often gap out in helping their teams to connect their roles with purpose.
Cybercrime remains a major challenge-
What Happened: AI-aided phishing attacks increased, with cybercriminals and hactivists leveraging generative AI to create more convincing and sophisticated phishing attempts. In addition, ransomware attacks continued to evolve, with threat actors developing new techniques to shape-shift, evade detection and maximize impact. With that we witnessed an expanded role for CISOs shifting more towards proactive cybersecurity strategies, including continuous threat exposure management (CTEM), automated security control assessments (ASCA) and 3rd party software development lifecycles. Lastly, organizations adopted more comprehensive data resiliency approached including AI driven monitoring and investments in rapid restoration and recovery.
Missed Opportunities: Social engineering continues to be the largest vector of attack and while security training has evolved we, as humans are struggling to interpret threats fast enough.
Some New Predictions for 2025
AI (and LLMs) will evolve to be our own personal “on-demand” Strategist – AI will become a digital “consultant,” running simulations for go-to-market plans, risk assessments, and competitive analyses. This analysis will move from text-based to multi-modal allowing for real-time spreadsheet, presentation and video interpretation. I expect we will see these solutions as a natural extension to their underlying platforms putting companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, Zoom in the cat-bird seat to prove them out. Failing to deliver will present new opportunities to dis-intermediate “data stores” from “answer engines”.
The movement of data will drive a new era of “Edge Wars” – Telecoms, hyperscalers, and networking hardware vendors will all battle for edge dominance, potentially forging new alliances and M&A activity. Complete modernization of the data pipeline including visibility, observability, security and activation will drive significant new opportunities across retail, healthcare, manufacturing and government.
The reality of Multi-Cloud 2.0 will drive the concept of a unified data platform – A new wave of automation, orchestration and observability platforms will finally allow for a unified enterprise data platform including multiple cloud providers, on-prem systems, and the edge delivering the preverbal “single pane of glass.”
Security Ramps up both end-to-end & Planning for Quantum – As cybercrime intensifies, DevSecOps will become the standard for building “security in” from the outset and AI-based anomaly detection will morph from “nice perk” to table stakes. Enterprises will also start to evaluate their security posture to pivot to quantum-safe encryption pilots, leveraging frameworks from NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Project.
AI Surge will drive Ethical Tech & Regulations Surge – Governments worldwide will enact stringent new AI and data privacy laws, forcing algorithmic transparency, and stricter governance including data ownership and provenance. Companies will need to demonstrate responsible AI usage to maintain public trust and energy sustainability to support scale.
Governmental Policy will drive a focus on Circular Economies & Sustainable Supply Chains – Businesses will continue to move beyond greenwashing, fully embracing sustainable cradle-to-cradle product design, packaging and scope emissions. Partnerships with NGOs and technology providers will bolster traceability and waste reduction. Governmental policy will be crucial in ensuring reliable and resilient supply chains to support worldwide growth and resilience to tariff risks.
Talent Acquisition and Development will the critical enabler of growth – Successful enterprises will embrace their people as their most valuable asset delivering not just financial rewards but focused professional development and leverage return-to-office to drive deeper social connections and cultural bonding. Leaders will be held to inspire and connect their teams to purpose with the courage to make better decisions, faster
Final Word
If 2024 showed us anything it’s that technology can indeed evolve faster than we expect and that we, as humans and employees have an opportunity to embrace the opportunities it presents to build and grow our careers. We are most definitely entering the next era of societal change with AI and we all have a collective responsibility to build it responsibly for the next generation.
For 2025, the challenge (and opportunity) will be to start implementing these emerging technologies, scaling them while keeping an eye on governance, compliance, and cultural readiness. By heeding the lessons of 2024 and embracing the bolder moves on the horizon, organizations will position themselves at the vanguard of innovation, ready to seize the game-changing possibilities that lie ahead.
Leave a Reply