What tech trends will be most important in 2025?

AI tops the list of 2025 tech trends in IEEE survey

Artificial intelligence is expected to be the most important technology in the coming year—the second time in a row that AI has topped IEEE’s annual Impact of Technology survey.

And which industry is expected to be most impacted by AI? Telecommunications.

Respondents in the IEEE survey on tech trends, which was conducted in September of this year among more than 350 CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, and other technology leaders in Brazil, China, India, the U.K. and U.S., were asked to choose the top three technologies that they expected to be the most important in 2025.

Nearly 60% chose AI (in its various forms such as predictive, generative or natural-language), 26% chose cloud computing and 24% said robotics.

Interestingly, however, most respondents—a resounding 91%—indicated that 2025 will be somewhat of a year of reckoning for generative AI, with “public fascination and perception shift[ing] to a greater understanding of and expectations for, what the technology can and should do — in terms of accuracy of results, transparency around deepfakes and more,” IEEE said.

While most survey respondents expected to see more adoption of generative AI by their organization, nearly 20% indiciated that they had faced difficulties with genAI adoption and would be rethinking their approach to the technology.

Asked about which industries would be most impacted by AI, the top choice among survey respondents was telecommunications at 45%—a four percent increase from last year’s survey. Banking and financial services, media and entertainment and manufacturing were among the other top verticals expected to be most impacted by AI.

What are seen as the top potential use cases in 2025 for AI? Real-time cybersecurity uses led the options (48% of respondents), followed by educational activities such as customized learning and intelligent tutoring, and 35% saw AI as being used to accelerate or assist software development.

The survey also asked about what skills the human workforce needs in AI-related roles. The top four survey responses were software development skills, an understanding of AI ethical practices, data analysis skills and data modeling/processing skills.

The tech trends survey also found that along with AI, there is widespread interest in developing and deploying human-like robots for tasks such as cleaning and deliveries. “In 2025, 37% of technology leaders are considering implementing humanoid robots into operations while 35% expect to have implementation of humanoid robots started and 18% expect to have them fully implemented into operations,” IEEE said.

Additionally, quantum computing is expected to be an important emerging technology in 2025. IEEE noted that more than a third of respondents said that they expect the integration and implementation of quantum computing in operations to be started by their companies in the coming year; another third said that quantum would be fully implemented in operations in 2025. Twenty-eight percent more said that they were considering it.

And looking beyond 2025, the IEEE survey respondents estimated that more than 40% of businesses would be deploying quantum computers in the next three years.