Each year, ABI Research unveils must-know tech stats for the year ahead. Each year, Gartner does its top 10 predictions for the year ahead. Each year, Deloitte does a state of the industry market for verticals like transportation, construction, and manufacturing. For today’s blog, I will share my thoughts on what has been found for the year ahead, and I will share my thoughts on how you can best parse through all this information to make decisions for your business.
ABI Research Must Know Tech Stats
For 2025, ABI Research has analyzed 66 critical trends across 33 growth sectors and 33 facing contraction. The report is long and is packed full of topics, but there are a few that stand out, many of which are obvious trends.
For one, cloud and AI (artificial intelligence) integration will grow, with enterprise large language model spending seeing a huge spike. At the same time, sustainability will continue to pick up speed, particularly in the European Union. However, one booming market is something not a lot of people are talking about—and that is smart wearables, particularly smart ring shipments, driven by health tracking, payments, and security use cases.
Perhaps more interestingly, there are a few markets facing headwinds including: virtual network functions, biometric payment cards, plug-in hybrid vehicles (due to the rise of full electric), and vision AI—here we see large vision models will struggle, while computer vision will maintain dominance.
Gartner Top Technology Predictions
Each year, Gartner does its top technology predictions for the year ahead, which we have written about many times. In fact, at the end of last year, I did a blog including some of its predictions for 2025. The interesting thing here is that some of the predictions go beyond the general AI growth predictions, looking at new and emerging trends to keep an eye on.
For example, disinformation security is a growing trend to prevent impersonation and track the spread of harmful information. Ambient invisible intelligence enables affordable tracking and sensing. Polyfunctional robots will replace task-specific robots. And neurological enhancement will improve human cognitive ability using technologies that read and decode brain activity. Of course, I go into more depth in the blog I wrote at the end of last year.
Deloitte State of Reports
Each year, Deloitte drafts a detailed report of the state of various vertical industries—many of which we cover here at both Connected World and Constructech. Some examples include manufacturing, transportation, and engineering and construction.
Often, the big takeaway in these reports is there will be a rise in technology adoption, such as AI, and the industry must take the steps to prepare. Each report considers hurdles each industry faces and opportunities new technologies bring.
Of course, this is just a sampling of some of the predictions that have been made for 2025. The questions now become: How do you pick? How do you do your homework? How do you determine the best direction?
Trends come and go, but businesses need to be focused on their corporate mission and their objectives. Sometimes, shiny technology syndrome can get in the way of that. Businesses also need to be able to find consultants they trust and know who have their best interests at heart.
This requires doing your homework and having a team in place that understands the vision of the leadership at the top and the team that wants to execute the vision. Sometimes you invest with the wrong team and it’s costly, but that’s why having a plan in place with a vision, and following a plan, makes a difference.
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