The latest Forrester report has revealed the latest trends in the technology and security segment in the year 2025.
As IT systems grow increasingly complex, over 50 percent of technology decision-makers will face moderate to severe technical debt by 2025, rising to 75 percent by 2026 due to the rapid adoption of AI-driven solutions. To manage this growing debt, leaders are turning to AIOps platforms, which enhance decision-making, automate incident remediation, and boost business outcomes. However, successful implementation of AIOps requires addressing challenges similar to other enterprise AI initiatives, including establishing the right culture, data strategies, architecture, and security practices.
Enterprises are enhancing customer experience, employee productivity, and revenue with AI, but a reset is occurring as initial use cases become standard. Realizing that AI ROI takes longer than expected, leaders are adopting a pragmatic approach, focusing on delivering value over time. According to Forrester’s Q2 AI Pulse Survey (2024), 49 percent of U.S. generative AI decision-makers expect ROI within 1–3 years, while 44 percent anticipate it within 3–5 years. Impatience with returns may lead to reduced investments, risking long-term setbacks. To succeed, AI leaders should align strategies with business goals, prioritize unique use cases using proprietary data, and create balanced roadmaps for short- and long-term ROI to sustain reinvestment and innovation.
TuringBots, AI-powered development tools, are transforming the software development lifecycle by automating tasks and assisting teams. According to Forrester’s Developer Survey (2024), 24 percent of executives plan to adopt AI and generative AI across the entire development process within the next year. Key advancements driving this shift include widespread adoption of coder and tester TuringBots, the rise of multimodal AI models like Google Gemini, expanded foundation model context windows, and agentic AI. Beyond coding and testing, these tools can generate product requirement documents, analyze and productize feedback from text and video, create requirement templates, and automate infrastructure playbooks, significantly broadening their applications.
The EU AI Act’s enforcement begins in February 2025 with a focus on prohibited use cases, expanding to general-purpose AI (GPAI) models like generative AI in June 2025. The EU AI Office and data protection authorities will oversee GPAI providers, with the first fine expected in 2025 for non-compliance. While GPAI providers bear direct compliance responsibilities, organizations using these models are also accountable, creating significant third-party risk. To mitigate this, companies must rigorously vet their AI providers, ensure adherence to requirements like training source disclosures and adversarial testing results, and maintain thorough documentation to avoid investigations and fines.
Agentic AI architectures, hailed as a top emerging technology for 2024, remain two years away from fulfilling their automation potential. While companies are extending generative AI to handle more complex tasks, the complexity of agentic AI — requiring multiple models, advanced RAG stacks, sophisticated data architectures, and specialized expertise — poses significant challenges. Misaligned models and unmet expectations will lead 75 percent of enterprises attempting to build these agents independently in 2024 to fail. Most will turn to consultancies or rely on vendor ecosystems for custom setups. Forward-thinking organizations will recognize these limitations and collaborate with vendors and systems integrators to develop cutting-edge agentic AI solutions.
On-premises computing is resurging as organizations address sovereignty, cost, and data security challenges. Large enterprises already adopting hybrid cloud strategies will increasingly invest in private clouds to meet security, privacy, and compliance needs for tasks like foundation model training, RAG integration, and AI automation. However, VMware may see reduced growth due to recent pricing changes, with new and expanding private cloud adopters favoring alternatives. By 2025, major public cloud providers are expected to boost private cloud investments, while hyperconverged platforms like Nutanix and open-source solutions like OpenStack gain traction. OpenStack’s success will depend on a stronger vendor ecosystem. Private cloud growth will complement, not replace, public cloud expansion, and VMware users will likely scale back renewals.
