Pop culture has long looked forward to the year 2025. The movie Repo Men envisioned bio-mechanical organ repossessions, while Pacific Rim explained that we’d all be fighting alien monsters in robot suits.
Quasi-forgotten 80s and 90s actioners pictured that year as a wasteland in which desperate gladiators battled it out on reality shows called Endgame or state-sponsored Futuresport competitions. The 80s novel NYPD 2025 imagines a police force with flying cars, and to be honest, given that department’s budget of $5.8 billion for fiscal 2025, the NYPD probably would be the first to get them.
But one 1972 dystopian novel centered on themes that are more familiar to those of us who are actually entering 2025 now: Thomas M. Disch’s 334 is set in 2025 New York City, and centers on ever-worsening class divisions between the haves and the have-nots. The title refers both to the street number of a public housing project and to a year marking the decline of the Roman Empire.
Is the world witnessing another declining empire today, as we reach the first quarter-century mark of the new millennium? Let’s leave that question open-ended. For now, we’re keeping the predictions less grandiose, and just delivering eight future-telling forecasts that we’ve collected from dozens of tech experts and top business leaders.
Here’s why small data will be huge, why conversational interfaces will take off, and why the 2025 job market will just be the worst.
What’s to come…
- AI’s Environmental Impact Will no Longer be Ignored
- 2025 Will Mark a Shift from “Big Data” to “Small Data”
- AI hype will be Replaced with Tangible Results
- Businesses will Swap Growth at all Costs “Precision Growth”
- Federal Layoffs, AI Impact and Mass Deportation will Cripple the Job Market
- “Quiet Quitting” Will be Swapped for “Reluctant Retention”
- Music and Atmosphere Will be the New Retail Shopping Differentiator
- Gen Zers Will Spur the Growth of Conversational Interfaces
AI’s Environmental Impact Will Evolve from Footnote to Headline
AI tools are the talk of the town: As 2024 ends, 72% of businesses have stated they’ve already adopted AI for at least one business function. Some love these tools and others hate them, but the impact of artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be felt across all of 2025. So, it’s only natural that concerns about the negative impacts of the tech will rise to the surface.
We’ve already seen plenty of AI ethics discussions. In 2025, those will be matched by an increased focus on it’s environmental footprint, thanks to all the energy consumption that the tech thrives off of.
That’s the prediction out from Mei Dent, CTO and CPO at TeamViewer, at least. Here’s how Dent explains it:
“The conversation will evolve from solely discussing AI’s potential for solving environmental challenges to addressing the technology’s own substantial energy demands. Major AI providers have yet to talk about their power consumption metrics, focusing instead on capability and performance. However, as AI deployments scale and data centers grow, questions about power sources, energy efficiency and environmental sustainability are becoming impossible to ignore.
Organizations don’t want to be left behind when it comes to AI, but they need to square their interest with its environmental costs in addition to its business benefits.
As a result, we might see AI solutions that optimize energy efficiency thrive in the new year: “The most successful companies will be those that find the sweet spot between AI capability and environmental responsibility,” Dent says.
Sustainability will be huge outside of AI, too, according to Startle CEO Adam Castleton, who says that “we’re likely to see the rise of zero-waste stores, refill stations, and circular economy initiatives like resale platforms.”
2025 Will Mark a Shift from “Big Data” to “Small Data”
Organizations will learn to focus on quality over quantity in the upcoming year, says Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Amplitude. That’s a bold claim: Thanks to AI hype, data sets have been getting bigger and bigger in recent years.
However, Ajenstat notes that this mindset shift has already been indicated by the rise of small language models.
“Organizations are realizing they don’t need to bring all their data to solve a problem or complete an initiative – they need to bring the right data. The overwhelming abundance of data, often referred to as the ‘data swamp,’ has made it harder to extract meaningful insights. By focusing on more targeted, higher-quality data– or the “data pond”– organizations can ensure data trust and precision.” ~Ajenstat
The end result? Faster and more accurate analysis timelines, more teams actually using data to drive decisions, and better ROI from data investments.
AI Hype Will be Replaced by a Focus on Tangible Results
A predicted shift towards small data dovetails with one of the general sentiments that we saw from our AI expert predictions this go-around: In general, techies are expecting businesses to start demanding genuine business applications from AI tools in 2025, not just the potential for them.
For example, SciPlay’s SVP of Data & Analytics, Shmuel Ben-Meleh, noted the gap between AI hype and results. “While companies are eager to adopt AI,” Ben-Meleh says, “they often struggle to integrate and monetize these sophisticated technologies into daily operations in a meaningful way. Practical, day-to-day applications of AI remain limited, with only a handful of use cases proving viable for immediate impact.”
“At its core,” Ajenstat sums it up, “AI is just software. While it can be incredibly powerful, it’s only valuable when it solves real customer problems.” If you want good results, it only makes sense to start small. Which leads us right into our next prediction…
Businesses Will End Growth at all Costs and Shift to “Precision Growth”
Andy Byrne, CEO at the AI-powered revenue platform Clari, puts it pretty clearly: “The era of growth at all costs is over.”
Instead, successful companies in the upcoming year “will adopt precision growth strategies, aligning every function — sales, marketing, finance, customer sucess — around shared metrics and goals. Companies that achieve this will not only grow predictably but will redefine operational efficiency as a competitive advantage, earning outsized investor confidence.”
This makes sense: We’re already seeing increasing demands for cost efficiency over the past few years, resulting in widespread tech layoffs. In 2025, don’t hold your breath for the the job market to rally.
Expect an Even Worse Job Market, Thanks to Ex-Federal Employees, AI Impacts, and Mass Deportations
Y-Vonne Hutchinson, CEO and founder of company culture platform Superessence as well as the organizational consulting firm ReadySet, has identified three major factors behind a potentially lopsided job market in 2025.
First, we can expect thousands of federal employees entering the job market, if Elon Musk’s management of X gives us a track record to expect from his tenure at DOGE: “mass layoffs, cutting job functions he doesn’t understand, and using brute force to mandate a return to the office,” as Hutchinson puts it.
Another source of federal employees? “If Trump also fulfills his promise to remove trans and LGBTQ+ people from the military, there will be a flood of veterans looking for work as well. Loosening interest rates may open the pipeline for new jobs, but the market will be much more competitive as federal employees join the fray.”
At the same time, we’ll see massive turnover in industries dominated by immigrants, since Trump has promised mass deportations under his new administration. “What we saw happen to the agriculture industry in Florida—when Ron DeSantis cracked down on illegal immigrations—will happen nationwide,” Hutchinson notes.
Finally, AI may further worsen the job market, since it will start replacing open jobs.
“As AI becomes more advanced and better at handling monotonous tasks, we’re going to see more AI adoption across industries, reaching an inflection point in the latter half of 2025. AI job displacement will become a reality, leading to a lot of unemployment and resentment at the end of next year.” ~Hutchinson
All these factors together spell bad news for the working class in the US, and might push us into that recession that experts have been predicting for a while now.
The Next “Quiet Quitting” is “Reluctant Retention”
One more major impact of that shaky job market will be plenty of unhappy employees who won’t want to move on to the next position, given the grueling, lengthy job search that they’ll have to endure in order to do so. So long to the trend of “quiet quitting.”
As a result, they’ll stick around in unfulfilling positions — ensuring that everyone else around them is as unhappy as they are.
“Because the job market for certain fields is so tight at the moment, many employees are stuck balancing both disliking their job and knowing that they need to hang onto it. The result is a workforce ‘reluctantly retained,’ causing strife for managers trying to get them to rise to the occasion. In 2025 we’ll see more employees just engaged enough to hang on until their prospects open up to leave” ~Terrence Cummings, Chief Opportunity Officer at education and skilling provider Guild
If everyone’s struggling to stay in their jobs, buying power will likely drop. That’s bad news for retail operations everywhere. However, our next prediction might offer some solace.
Music and Atmosphere Will be the New Retail Shopping Differentiator
Granted, this prediction comes straight from Adam Castleton, CEO of the in-store music provider Startle, so it might be safe to say he has some skin in the game. But it’s an interesting topic: Just how will brick-and-mortar retailers evolve to keep competing with ecommerce operations in the new year? By targeting all five senses, if Castleton’s input is anything to go by.
“Music and ambience have long influenced consumer behavior, but their impact will become more sophisticated by 2025,” he says. “One survey found that 66% of adults think that the type of music in store will influence their purchase. Retailers will adapt in real time to customer demographics, weather, or time of day. For example, upbeat tempos during weekend mornings might energize shoppers, while slower, calming tunes in the evening could extend browsing time.”
Castleton highlights other senses, too: lighting, scent, and even temperature.
Gen Z Will Spur the Growth of Conversational Interfaces
Joseph George, General Manager of IT Solutions Group at GoTo, says that the younger generation entering the workforce will lead to changes in what types of business software is most useful: self-service tools will increase in popularity, with AI tech helping to make this possible.
“We will see an uptick in self-service functionalities, especially as new talent enters the workforce. Gen Z, accustomed to having solutions at their fingertips, prefer to handle tasks themselves and solve problems independently. To meet this expectation, more businesses will use conversational interfaces—powered by generative AI-powered agents—and start to replace classic drag-and-drop and low-code paradigms of interaction.”
It’s part of a wider industry shift that George foresees, in which IT departments will start to transition from reactive to proactive. IT pros will move past the “break-fix” mindset, opting for key differentiators that aid in detecting issues — monitoring, telemetry, and predictive analytics.
Let’s hope all those predictive analytics can deliver on solving problems before they manifest. Maybe this time next year, we can just fire up the prediction machine, give that conversational interface a few questions about the future of tech, and let it handle writing the Tech.co predictions article for 2026.
