The beginning of a new year holds so much promise: new breakthroughs, releases, and successes all hang in the balance.
At the same time, the last few days of the year provide a perfect vantage point to look clearly at how the past 12 months have panned out and use this knowledge to help decide which successes are the most likely – and which may not pan out.
As 2024 draws to a close, the ITPro team has drawn together some closing thoughts on the biggest trends of the past year and the technologies that could come to define 2025.
AI continues to lead conversations
Every member of the ITPro team points to AI as the standout 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 they’ve made in the past year or two.
Jane McCallion, managing editor at ITPro, argues that AI will dominate 2025 even without any significant technological breakthroughs. This, she explains, is because businesses will finally be able to make good on AI spending.
“Organizations, having thrown money at AI investment in the abstract, may finally establish what they really want to use it for,” says McCallion.
An outlier model for AI that’s already leading conversations as we go into the new year is the use of AI agents, generative AI models that can complete tasks autonomously, with all the hyperscalers and major AI vendors having released their own agentic AI offerings.
“We’ve spent more than a year trying to work out how impactful AI assistants and ‘copilots’ will be for enterprises, and how they’ll support workers,” says Ross Kelly, news & analysis editor at ITPro. “With autonomous ‘agents’ picking up the slack for staff across a range of professions, we could finally see the promised productivity benefits of AI coming to fruition.”
For Bobby Hellard, reviews editor at ITPro, AI PCs featuring neural processing units (NPUs) have been the standout technology of 2024. At the same time, he argues that these have been little more than proving platforms for the real hardware and software changes that AI PCs could drive in 2025 and beyond.
“They use AI to improve video call quality or predictive text and translation features – it’s hardly the stuff of the future,” he says. “While 2024 was the year of the AI PC, 2025 needs to be about adding more useful features and tools.”
The dark horse of 2025
Outside of the obvious trends, the team also weigh in on underpriced trends for 2025 – aspects of technological shifts that might not be apparent to the entire sector at the moment.
ITPro staff writer, Solomon Klappholz holds hope for more work on the ethics and environmental impact of AI in 2025, as more attention is given to these issues.
“I think people are going to become way more aware of the fact that data centers are springing up everywhere around the world, and start to have broader conversations about AI’s energy usage,” he says.
“These facilities often have deleterious impacts on local capacity as they heap stress on regional energy grids, and as the tangible effects of climate change continue to endanger communities, I think it’s time the technology industry takes a sober look at how it is exacerbating the problem, rather than helping it.”
George Fitzmaurice, our other staff writer, adds that there’s potential for governments to get involved here, as nations 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. It’s for this reason that Kelly bets on the repatriation of cloud workloads, as leaders chase private AI, sovereign cloud, and lower overall spending.
“While the great cloud repatriation trend of 2023 didn’t really go anywhere, AI could be the motivation behind a new-found love for on-prem infrastructure,” Kelly says.
A more practical focus
While every new year brings innovation, each also brings new challenges and failures for some products and technologies. Asked to choose the trend or technology that’s least likely to survive 2025, the ITPro team centers on yet more AI products alongside a long-time target of ridicule for the industry.
Fitzmaurice argues that AI hype is unlikely to stay at its current level across 2025, as leaders get more comfortable the technology and understand better its actual value to their business.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop talking about it, but I expect people to start talking about in a more practical way, focusing on what it can actually deliver and what it can actually do,” he adds.
Klappholz and Hellard point to two specific AI releases of 2024 as products they think will be reduced or rolled back in 2025. For Klappholz, this is Google’s controversial addition of AI answers in its search engine by default, which was quickly criticized for serving users dangerous answers to benign questions.
For Hellard, it’s Microsoft Recall in the firing line. This is a new Windows feature that combines regular screenshots of users’ screens and AI to let them scan back through their PC activity to find things they’ve seen earlier in the day. Hellard thinks that this will be scrapped in 2025 for a mixture of reasons.
“It’s been controversial from the get-go, repeatedly delayed, and marred in privacy issues. It also doesn’t sound very worthwhile; do you really need the computer to remember exactly what you’ve done all the time? If you’ve forgotten where a tab is or what you were looking at on social media, it kind of sounds like you’re procrastinating!”
Kelly points to a different combination of software and hardware as the most likely to fail in 2025: virtual reality.
“It’s safe to say the metaverse has been dying a slow death since big tech turned its attention to generative AI,” Kelly says. “2024 itself was a horrendous year for Meta’s Reality Labs division, which posted huge losses and experienced job cuts.
“With Zuckerberg and Meta leading the charge on this front since its inception, the firm’s neglect on this front speaks volumes. I’m all for seeing the metaverse dream die. Who wants to spend their work days messing around in VR when you can jump on a Teams call?”
