By the end of 2025, businesses will no longer be experimenting with artificial intelligence. Instead, they will be rushing to stay up with its rapid advancement as generative AI develops into agentic AI, automation advances, and emergent technologies move towards widespread deployment.
However, making the appropriate technological investment decision will be crucial for business growth and competitive advantage in light of the geopolitical unpredictability, new research from Forrester shows.
Forrester's research on emerging technologies in 2025 highlights tech that will help drive AI-led innovation while enabling long-term resilience. The research categorises these technologies by their impacts over short-term, mid-term, and long-term benefits horizons.
Short-Term Emerging Technologies
IoT Security: IoT security technology will be essential to bolstering defences for connected devices and data as cyber threats rise. IoT security will be most beneficial to companies with a high level of technological integration.
Synthetic Data: New to Forrester's emerging technologies list this year, this technology enhances AI model training while improving trust and privacy. The sectors that stand to gain the most from regulators pushing businesses to adopt synthetic data to reduce risk include financial services, insurance, healthcare and government.
Mid-Term Emerging Technologies
Agentic AI: The immediate potential of agentic AI is increased flexibility and adaptability to automate certain business processes. Even while early AI agent prototypes show promise and provide autonomous decision-making, accuracy, trust and coordination are still needed.
Gen AI For Visual Content: By helping companies create and implement photorealistic images, videos and motion graphics, this technology is poised to impact marketing, advertising, retail and e-commerce sectors, delivering immersive and personalised preferences to customers.
Emerging Technology
Humanoid Robots: This is the first year that this emerging technology has appeared on Forrester's list. Humanoid robots — autonomous machines that look and behave like humans and equipped with sensors, AI and actuators to carry out tasks — are becoming increasingly common as a result of gen AI's quick development and falling hardware costs. However, their widespread use will be hampered by issues like expensive R&D expenses and the difficulties of integrating robots into current infrastructure and operations.
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