The 2025 Gartner® Top Tech Trends: Are You Tracking These Technologies?

Each year, we see emerging technologies that could have a major impact on how businesses operate. Some technologies, like 3D printing, don’t exactly live up to the hype, and remain useful for niche use cases without reaching mass market adoption.  Whether you’re a Chief Technology Officer, Head of HR, product designer, or work in strategic foresight, it’s important to identify which emerging technologies could have the greatest relevance and impact for your business. 

To help you make such informed decisions, Gartner has published its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025. You can download the Gartner report from the ITONICS website, to see what technology trends Gartner experts predict will have the greatest impact in the next five years. In this blog article, we’ll highlight the importance of keeping track of emerging technologies and share ITONICS’ perspective on three technology trends from the Gartner report.

How to keep up with emerging technologies

Tech-powered markets are growing at 10x the rate of their traditional counterparts (Boston Consulting Group). Yet, only 14% of businesses are making the most of technology to stay ahead of the game. A quarter are late adopters, slow to build their tech capabilities, while the rest fall between cautious learners and partial implementers, struggling to achieve meaningful outcomes or falling behind in core competencies (Bain). 

Martec’s Law best explains this challenge: technology evolves exponentially, but organizational change occurs much more slowly. This mismatch creates a widening gap where businesses fail to recognize the potential impact or adapt quickly enough to harness the potential of emerging tools. 

As polyfunctional robots, neurological enhancements, and agentic AI become more available, the question shifts to strategic integration—ensuring these technologies are responsibly embedded into your business to drive sustainable growth. 

We’ve plotted the top technology trends from the Gartner report on a radar and added our own ratings in terms of technology readiness, potential impact, and complexity. This provides a jumping-off point for you to evaluate the relevance of these technologies to your business. We recommend doing such an exercise collaboratively by involving different departments in your organization. Check out our How to rate technologies’ cheat sheet which will guide you through making informed decisions about new technologies. 

Polyfunctional robots at work

According to Gartner, “Tomorrow’s polyfunctional robots are a different breed. These robots can take on different tasks, but are also designed to fit into a human-shaped world, thus removing the need for architectural changes to the process (or bolt-down infrastructure in the working environment), making for fast deployment, low risk and easy scalability.” Gartner estimates that “by 2030, 80% of humans will engage with smart robots on a daily basis, up from less than 10% today.”

At ITONICS, we see polyfunctional robots gaining momentum, with a range of promising startups demonstrating their solutions for different use cases. Such robots can switch tasks rapidly—whether in manufacturing lines, warehousing, or eventually in consumer settings—thanks to advanced robotics software and improvements in actuators and battery capabilities. While not commonly available, the gap between prototypes and early commercial solutions is closing.

Our assessment is that adoption complexity remains high. Deploying robots that seamlessly coexist with human workers demands extensive safety measures, advanced AI-driven autonomy, and new considerations for workspace layout. The return on investment may be worthwhile, but organizations must account for ongoing maintenance, staff training, and integration challenges when deploying multi-task robots at scale.

Neurological enhancement through brain-machine interfaces

Gartner states that “neurological enhancement improves human cognitive abilities using technologies that read and decode brain activity. It ‘reads’ a person’s brain to provide ‘brain transparency’ by using unidirectional brain-machine interfaces or bidirectional brain-machine interfaces and a range of other approaches. Soon, neurological enhancement will also be able to ‘write’ to the brain, enhancing its function.” 

Gartner describes a staggering future:

“By 2030, 30% of knowledge workers will be enhanced by, and dependent on, technologies such as BBMIs (both employer- and self-funded) to stay relevant with the rise of AI in the workplace, up from less than 1% in 2024.”

In our view at ITONICS, neurological enhancements through brain-machine interfaces could have major positive and negative effects on society. Noninvasive wearables already exist in niche fields such as gaming or mindfulness, but more advanced and invasive implementations are just starting to cross into human trials. These developments could revolutionize learning through neural implants and allow control of devices through thought.

The impact of this technology on human behavior and autonomy, privacy concerns, and the digital divide may have unforeseen consequences. Interfacing directly with human brains brings major ethical, regulatory, and privacy challenges. Surgical implants raise the stakes further, requiring rigorous safety testing and societal acceptance. Even noninvasive forms must address data privacy concerns when collecting signals that could reveal highly personal information. We foresee a lengthy journey before widespread adoption becomes technically and legally feasible.

Agentic AI promises a virtual workforce

According to Gartner, “Agentic AI systems autonomously plan and take actions to meet user-defined goals.” It anticipates that “by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from zero percent in 2024.”

At ITONICS, we foresee that organizations will use agentic AI to augment knowledge workers, automate entire workflows, and handle adaptive decision-making at scale, all of which can fuel productivity gains across countless industries. AI agents offer tremendous advantages but also present risks related to technical errors, security vulnerabilities, ethical challenges, impacts on the labor market, and broader societal impacts, especially when human oversight is minimized. 

We anticipate that implementing agentic AI at the enterprise level will be complicated and require the right guardrails. Monitoring agents in real-time will demand human expertise. This is why we rate its complexity as ‘high’ and encourage organizations to adopt an incremental approach, starting with low-risk pilot projects.

Upgrade technology management with ITONICS

At ITONICS, we see emerging technologies as solution drivers that represent a market push. To make the most of these opportunities, you need a reliable process to evaluate their relevance to your company, considering both external market forces and internal business factors. 

Many leading companies use ITONICS software to build technology radars that map their technology landscape in one view. This makes it easier for multiple teams to compare technologies for potential investment and communicate a shared vision of the future. If you’d like to see for yourself how our approach to technology management can benefit your business, book a demo with one of our experts.

Disclaimer

Gartner, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, Gene Alvarez, Tom Coshow, et al, 21 October 2024  GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.