Generative AI continues to be the buzzword of the year, but Tech Trends 2025—and in fact, the future of technology—is about much more than AI. This year’s report reveals the extent to which AI is being woven into the fabric of our lives. We’ll eventually take it for granted and think of it in the same way that we think of HTTP or electricity: We’ll just expect it to work. AI will perform quietly in the background, optimizing traffic in our cities, personalizing our health care, or creating adaptative and accessible learning paths in education. We won’t proactively use it; we’ll simply experience a world in which it makes everything work smarter, faster, and more intuitively—like magic, but grounded in algorithms. The six chapters of Tech Trends 2025 reflect this emerging reality.

Tech Trends, Deloitte’s flagship technology report, explores the emergence of trends in three elevating forces (interaction, information, and computation) and three grounding forces (business of technology, cyber and trust, and core modernization)—all part of our macro technology forces framework (figure 1). Tech Trends 2025, our 16th trip around the sun, previews a future in which artificial intelligence will be as foundational as electricity to daily business and personal lives. As our team in Deloitte’s Office of the CTO put finishing touches on Tech Trends 2025, we realized that AI is a common thread in nearly every trend. We expect that going forward,

AI will be so ubiquitous that it will be a part of the unseen substructure of everything we do, and we eventually won’t even know it’s there