It’s time to look ahead to the technological trends we predict for 2025. Based on our insights, research, conversations with customers and talks with our peers, Artificial Intelligence is the thread weaving through every major technological advancement we predict for this year – from improving operational efficiencies to reshaping user experiences. But AI’s impact won’t be limited to just enhancing existing systems. It's also about redefining how CSPs and technology providers approach development, team structures, and customer interactions. Here are our technology predictions for 2025:
If your organization isn’t already utilizing AI, 2025 is the year to make it a priority. It’s no exaggeration to say that AI can completely revamp and expedite technology roadmaps, if harnessed correctly. In their Annual Industry Survey 2024, Telecoms.com unveiled AI as the top investment priority for CSPs looking ahead to 2025.
But AI isn’t limited to IT and technology teams, it affects every part of your business. AI won’t replace people altogether – experienced developers will always be needed to check if AI-generated code works, for example – but it will replace those who fail to adapt and harness its potential.
As a leader in your business, your priority should be to make sure that your people embrace AI – you need to provide them with the right tools and encourage them to gain knowledge and experiment with how AI can make them more efficient.
We are seeing significant improvements in the software development process that reduce the need for traditional coding. Among these are the maturity of software solutions and architectures based on well-defined APIs, the availability of low-/no-code tools and Generative AI. Together, these advancements are reducing dependency on technology and allowing organizations to deliver technology solutions without going through heavyweight delivery projects.
We predict that the realms of Business and Technology will move closer – so close, in fact, that the boundaries between them will start to blur. Many business users are already gaining the ability to perform functions that were traditionally performed by technology teams. At the same time, technology teams will increasingly be evaluated based on the business outcomes they help achieve.
For vendors, this shift is a wake-up call. The days of focusing solely on software and developers are over. If you haven’t already transformed your software and tools to make them accessible for non-technical business users, you will be left behind. Success belongs to those who can bridge the gap between technology and business, making innovation a team goal across the organization.
The role of the software engineer has transformed significantly in recent years and demands a much broader skillset. Today, selecting the right cloud service from hundreds of options provided by Hyperscalers is often more critical than coding itself. It’s also a challenge to keep track of which services are available and understand their best use cases, as new services are released almost on a daily basis. GenAI is also disruptive – transforming how software is created by helping developers generate code like never before.
With all this new technology in play, the gap in productivity between the experienced engineer and the inexperienced developer is widening. Enter the Super Software Engineer. Using the right combination of cloud technology and GenAI tools, a single, highly-skilled engineer can potentially produce the output of a whole development team, in a fraction of the time. In 2025 and beyond, it will be more important than ever for businesses to select and develop the right people to take advantage of the boost this technology provides.
This shift has the capacity to fundamentally change DevOps. With the right Super Software Engineers in place, dev teams will become smaller, coding will become less visible, and the strategic use of technology will take center stage. These heroes will bring a mix of technical brilliance, business savvy, and the ability to master today’s ever-growing toolbox of technologies. The days of debating hourly rates, offshore versus onshore teams, and FTEs are fading. It’s now time to measure your vendors and SIs by the quality of the engineers themselves and the results they deliver.
Superheroes are rare, so once you’ve assembled your ‘Avengers’ by creating a high-powered team of Super Software Engineers, don’t let them go!
We all remember the days when the first chatbots were introduced on websites and, for the past decade, all of them had one thing in common: they didn’t really work and frustrated users. How many times did you think “please connect me to a real person” when you were raising a support request? The only way to achieve a superior UX was by providing custom individual UIs for each and every use case – an approach which clearly comes with high costs and long time-to-market.
Generative AI disrupted the way you can interact with IT systems, and chatbots such as ChatGPT finally give you the impression that these systems understand you. This revolutionizes user interface design, and we will see conversational user interfaces becoming mainstream in the coming years. Conversational AI will allow users to engage with systems using natural language, whether through text chat or voice commands, eliminating the need for complex, custom-built interfaces. It also provides a huge opportunity for software vendors, as it can take away a lot of user interface design complexity, especially when it comes to intricate use cases that provide the users a lot of options.
