Predictions 2025: Robots, quantum Q-Day, flying cars and Donald Trump
Insiders share their analyses of the trends that will matter in tech, science and ideas over the next 12 months.
Next year marks the fifth anniversary of the Covid pandemic, when billions of people were forced to shelter in place. In April 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously said: "We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months."
The era of social distancing has proved to be pivotal to the wider story of digital evolution across the world. We're still living with the aftershocks, which will continue to reverberate across the next 12 months. Throw AI, quantum, Elon Musk and President Donald Musk into the mix and you have the recipe for a very unpredictable year indeed.
Here are some of the predictions from our friends and contacts in the realms of tech, science and ideas. Thanks for supporting Machine, which launched at the beginning of December, and see you here again in the New Year!
A new start for Intel?
Philip Kaye, Co-founder of Vespertec
“Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s resignation sets the stage for a major shakeup of Intel’s strategy, and the incoming US administration could play a role. Trump has been vocal in his criticism of the CHIPS Act (from which Intel stands to gain $8.5 Billion in financial support). It’s likely we will see increased tariffs on Chinese imported goods, although given the dominance of Taiwan in the manufacturing of CPUs and GPUs this is unlikely to provide Intel with a major competitive advantage.
“Speculation is already swirling, from the possibility of another major firm acquiring Intel, to Intel striking a deal to manufacture AI chips for firms like NVIDIA. Whatever the outcome, expect game-changing news from the company in 2025.”
Shorter certificates
Kevin Bocek, Chief Innovation Officer, at Venafi, a CyberArk company
“Let’s Encrypt announcing that it will be offering 6 day certificates from next year is a clear signal to where the market is moving. There has been growing momentum around shorter certificate lifecycles – with Google having stated its intention to shorten the lifespan of public TLS certificates used with Chrome from 398 days to 90 days, and Apple directing a vote among Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/B Forum) members, to cut certificate lifespans to 47 days by 2028.
"Certificate lifespans are currently far too long, which increases the likelihood that they will be compromised – over half (57%) of organizations have experienced security incidents involving compromised TLS certificates in the past year. Shortening certificate lifespans will help businesses reduce that risk.
"In offering this new service, Let’s Encrypt is throwing down the gauntlet to other Certificate Authorities (CAs) to follow suit. Yet to take advantage of this new service and others like it, businesses will need the right processes and tools in place. Automation is essential if you want to rotate certificates every six days.
"While shortening certificate lifecycles helps reduce some risks and is a step in the right direction, it also brings added complexity for security teams. We’re not just dealing with minor red flags here – we’re seeing problems everywhere, from the cloud to virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. It’s not just one vendor’s issue; it’s the entire internet at stake."
We were promised flying cars (but won't see them anytime soon)
Efrain Ruh, Field CTO Continental Europe at Digitate.
"Over the next year, enterprises will need to make heavy investments to reduce their levels of complexity. Besides the efforts, we won’t overcome this in 2025 and not even in 2026. Some companies will focus on moving to SaaS and PaaS platforms; however, they will need to maintain certain critical workloads running on legacy systems until they figure out the best way to migrate. ZeroOps won’t happen overnight, to make it possible we need to build our applications resilient by design, trying to apply ZeroOps to a complex existing environment requires an enormous amount of effort and it is not always justified.
"There are similarities between the automotive industry's struggle to provide a full-autonomous driving experience, and IT Ops trying to deploy a fully autonomous solution for enterprise operations. It is not that the technology is not available, it has to do more with the liability - what happens when an AI Agent makes a mistake with catastrophic results? Who do we blame - the vendor of that software or the company that implemented the solution? Transparency and accountability will play a fundamental role in the de-utilisation of these new technologies in the future and this will continue to hold back adoption in 2025."
Shaking up open source
William Morgan, CEO, Buoyant
"Next year will see the continued closure, defunding, and relicensing of open source projects as the bill comes due for projects created in the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era. There will be a renewed focus on sustainability and commercial viability of open source, especially for critical infrastructure projects, as savvy adopters ask themselves: just how much can we truly rely on these projects to be around tomorrow?
"Finally, the resistance to discussing open source as anything other than an altruistic effort in selfless collaboration will start to erode, as the economic realities of paying maintainers for a free product become increasingly obvious.”
Quantum will muscle in on AI's place in the spotlight
Frank de Jong, Quantum Safe Network Lead at Orange Business:
“Despite AI dominating throughout 2024, the year closed with quantum computing stealing the spotlight as major developments in chip technologies hit the headlines. These machines, with their immense processing power, operate fundamentally differently from classical computers. They leverage quantum bits (qubits) to solve complex problems exponentially faster than even today’s supercomputers. But this extraordinary capability poses a dire threat to the encryption systems that secure sensitive data across the globe.
“The encryption algorithms protecting everything from personal financial records to national defence secrets rely on the difficulty of solving massive mathematical problems—an effort that would take classical computers centuries. Quantum computers, however, can solve these problems in mere hours or even minutes. Experts warn that "Q-Day"—the moment quantum computers break our current cryptography—could hit within the next decade.
“This risk is compounded by the practice of “harvest now, decrypt later,” where bad actors collect encrypted data today with the intention of cracking it once quantum technology matures. It’s a ticking time bomb for sensitive information that’s already been shared, emphasizing the urgent need for robust quantum-resistant encryption.
“Most security infrastructure was designed in an era where such computational leaps seemed like science fiction. Preparing for Q-Day must happen now. Organisations need to assess their current systems, identify vulnerabilities, and adopt post-quantum cryptography.
“2025 must be a turning point. It’s not just about reacting to quantum advancements; it’s about future-proofing the very foundation of digital security.”
Nation-state fraud intensifies
Tamas Kadar, CEO and co-founder at SEON
“Nation-state fraud is expected to rise, with diminishing emphasis on national cyber defense due to shifting political priorities. Historically robust efforts, such as those seen during the Bush administration, are unlikely to receive similar funding under current leadership. Simultaneously, the challenge of balancing the prevention of terrorism financing with the reality of high-level money laundering persists, creating a complex landscape of enforcement and compliance.
“With governments scaling back their involvement in third-party risk management, organizations must take greater responsibility for their cybersecurity. The increasing volume of attacks and the growing sophistication of supply chain breaches require businesses to develop internal processes for risk mitigation. Improvements in breach disclosure timelines, minimizing the storage of personally identifiable information (PII) and investing in robust protective measures are essential steps to ensure resilience against escalating threats.”
President Trump and a shift away from globalisation
Bernadette Bulacan Starin, Chief Evangelist, Icertis
“The incoming US administration will have a significant impact on global trade and regulations in 2025. As a result, supply chains will become more localised and legal departments will face a substantial shift away from globalisation, requiring them to negotiate and restructure innumerable contracts across jurisdictions. New contractual relationships will require language and structure to provide a level of flexibility unseen before, enabling businesses to traverse and navigate this uncertainty and complexity. AI will be critical to do this at speed and scale.
"As legal departments become inundated with rethinking the terms of their enterprise’s supplier and customer relationships, AI will play a pivotal role in ensuring that commercial outcomes around revenue, savings, and risk are not compromised. Legal departments remain cautiously optimistic when it comes to AI, but in a world where 55% of the c-suite believes Artificial General Intelligence will become a reality in 2025, the time for measured curiosity has run out."
The robots are coming (slowly)
Stefan Weitz, co-founder & CEO, HumanX
"Sure, I’m excited about Tesla’s Optimus robot, but more for its remarkable degrees of freedom and dexterity than its autonomous nature (which isn’t there yet). That said, there will be real improvements driven by simpler robots in 2025 like the ones from Softbank Robotics for things like food delivery and cleaning. The more humanoid robots I predict won’t see any mass scale next year, although work happening at Collaborative Robotics in the US and the frankly bonkers Astribot in China are showing real promise.
"Synthetic virtual people indistinguishable from real humans will enter the workforce, even if in limited ways, leading to debates about employment rights and creating a push for “AI citizenship” to define their societal roles and limitations. Companies like Aaru are pioneering this new take on a “digital twin” by providing companies with the ability to ask questions of every ‘human’ on the planet in seconds rather than relying on traditional polling or panels.
"At least one major, globally recognized company will fail or significantly downsize due to an inability to compete with one or more AI-native startups. Rapid innovation cycles and the horizontal application of AI will render slow movers obsolete."
Old-school storage makes a comeback
Erik Erlandson, Data Science Lead, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat
The next year will see generative AI architectures where knowledge and data increasingly migrate out of the models themselves and back to more traditional storage platforms such as relational databases and graph databases. Without the burden of needing to memorize factual information, generative AI models will become specialized for parsing human queries and mapping them to API calls for data retrieval. These models will be leaner, requiring less memory and compute cost.
Generative AI use cases are increasingly being asked to be extensible: stakeholders desire the ability to easily extend an existing gen-AI system with new data sources. The ecosystem will see improvements in system architectures and associated tooling that make it increasingly turn-key to add new data corpora, API calls, and routing logic.
Reproducible AI, or transparent AI, will become as important as openly licensed models. Stakeholders will increasingly expect to understand key details of training for foundational gen-AI models, as part of the model evaluation for security, safety and alignment. Stakeholders will begin to expect more rigorous predictions of gen AI model performance on their specific applications. Public non-specific benchmarks and leaderboards will begin to have less influence relative to application specific benchmarks, and benchmark data collection will increasingly focus on maximising coverage of possible user inputs.
DDoS is back and badder than ever
Darren Anstee, chief technology officer for security at NETSCOUT
“In 2025, we expect to see continued growth in the sophistication of DDoS attacks. By this, we mean more widespread use of sophisticated attack vectors and attack techniques that were previously solely the proviso of sophisticated adversaries. The attack tools available now have simplified access to these capabilities, driving the strong growth in application layer and multi-vectors attacks reported in NETSCOUT’s latest Threat Intelligence Report. For an ISP or MSSP, when these behaviours are coupled with multiple concurrent attacks to different target organisations, something we are seeing from some hacktivist groups, there is a growing challenge for the operations teams dealing with attacks.
“In some cases, these attacks can last for multiple days, with frequent rotation of attack vectors, requiring operations teams to constantly update their defensive strategies for each attack. The overall goal, from the threat actor’s perspective, seems to be to drive operational fatigue in defensive teams so that their attacks get through; however, with the right threat-intelligence, technology and operational best-practices these attacks are being successfully managed.”
The internet of things will place huge pressure on networks
Issam Toufik, CTO at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
The expansion of IoT devices at the consumer and business level is putting a strain on current networks. Faster speeds, along with AI and automation, are required at the network level to cope with this growing demand. Over the next year, there’ll be standards development for integrating AI and automation into telecom networks, focusing on improving network management, customer service, and operational efficiency.
"Compliance for OEMs: The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) introduced by the European Union, will be enforced from December 2024. The Act requires cybersecurity measures are maintained throughout the entire lifecycle of a digital product, ensuring ongoing protection against emerging threat. With the rise in IoT, industry 4.0 and connected devices, OEMs and retailers will need to prioritise cybersecurity in 2025 to avoid penalties and ensure market access.
"Greater collaboration between cloud providers: The EU Data Act, set to apply from September 2025, is expected to have a significant impact on the data economy in Europe. The Act aims to improve access to data for individuals and businesses, fostering a more competitive and innovative data market. This includes making it easier to switch between cloud providers and ensuring interoperability."
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