Exploring Tech Trends 2025

Device42 hosts the podcast The Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT, featuring Brian Jackson, Principal Research Director at Info-Tech and author of Tech Trends 2025, on the emerging trends set to transform IT by 2025.

The world of IT is evolving faster than ever, and organizations face both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. From AI sovereignty—where businesses control their AI models and data—to quantum computing breakthroughs, the future is redefining how IT leaders operate. Add to this the rising threats of deepfake technology, and it becomes clear that IT teams must prepare for a rapidly shifting digital landscape.

What do these trends mean for IT operations, strategy, and infrastructure?

In this episode, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT dives deep with Brian Jackson as he explores:

• AI sovereignty and the balance of innovation with control over data and performance standards.
• The rise of quantum computing and its potential to solve complex challenges across industries.
• How businesses can defend against the growing risks of deepfake technology.

Brian also shares actionable insights on how IT leaders can stay ahead of the curve by fostering innovation, navigating uncertainty, and preparing their teams for a transformative future.

Stay tuned as we explore the trends that will define IT in 2025 and beyond.

Welcome to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to it, brought to you by Device42. On this show, we explore the ins and outs of modern IT management and the infinite expanse of its universe. So buckle up and get ready to explore the ever changing landscape of modern IT management.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:00:28] Hello and welcome to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to It, where we dive into the latest trends and best practices shaping the world of information technology. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney, and today we are exploring a pivotal topic the emerging trends set to redefine it by 2025. From AI sovereignty and quantum computing advancements to strategies for defending against deepfakes, the landscape of it is evolving and evolving rapidly. In this episode, we will gain forward looking insights from our special guest, Brian Jackson, Principal Research Director at Infotech and author of Tech Trends 2025, to help you navigate these transformative shifts and stay ahead in a very competitive digital world. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brian Jackson: [00:01:15] My pleasure.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:01:16] Looking forward to getting into the conversation. Before we do that, can I ask you to give us a brief bio if you can, please?

Brian Jackson: [00:01:21] Yeah. Happy to. Michel. Thanks. I’m Brian Jackson with Info-tech research group. I’ve been with Infotech for five years developing the Tech Trends reports, as well as the CIO priorities reports and advising CIOs on how to navigate their first 100 days on the job, how to put together their IT strategies, how to pursue innovation approaches. And before I joined Infotech, I was a journalist that covered the IT industry and I led a newsroom, worked at IT World Canada for ten years. And, uh, you know, in the US, a lot of people are, uh, more familiar with the US affiliate, the IT world. Com but, uh, that’s me.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:02:07] Yeah. That’s awesome. So clearly you’re the right man for the job of being the guest on this podcast with what we’re about to talk about because, you know, you’ve you’ve written about it and written for a long time, especially with your background in journalism. But let’s start off here. The top emerging tech trends that you predict will shape it in 2025. What are they.

Brian Jackson: [00:02:27] Yeah, great. So in 2025 we were looking at six key trends. And they sort of go across three technology themes. So we’re looking at digital humans. And on the opportunity side there I’m looking at AI avatars or how we simulate human interactions across various channels. And I’m thinking about legitimate business purposes here. We’ve all talked to the chatbots by now, Michel, but in 2025 it’s going to branch out. We’ll be talking to AI avatars. We’ll be looking at AI avatars in the education space and the customer support space and entertainment. And then on the risk side of that, we’re looking at deepfake defense, because, of course, if the good guys can use AI avatars to simulate humans, we know the bad guys can do it too. And what are the implications of deepfake fraud going up and everybody being fooled by a very realistic looking version of our boss or a celebrity and so on. So we have to come up with new ways to defend against that. And then we’re looking at the quantum advantage, right. It’s the time for pre quantum foundations in 2025. Quantum computing is starting to become more useful. And it’s really interesting to see that there’s some companies that are out there on the leading edge. And they’re finding ways to apply quantum computing to create advantages in their industries.

Brian Jackson: [00:03:59] So we’re looking at that and we’re also looking at the need for post-quantum cryptography. We are under the threat of quantum computing breaking the systems of encryption that we use today. So we need to migrate those systems to be quantum resistant. And then the last theme is exponential AI which is just the advancement. And we’re all seeing this of AI into every business process, being involved in every industry. So the opportunity there is to pursue expert AI models. You know, the hot topic right now is agentic AI. And that’s when we combine AI that has expertise and can actually take action for you and automate some of the knowledge worker tasks that we perform every day. And then on the risk side, we’re looking at AI sovereignty. Yes, we want to take advantage. We want to harness AI. We want to put it to work for us, but we also want to maintain control. We want to make sure that we have confidential data. We want to make sure that we have control over the performance standards, and we want to make sure the costs don’t result in some sort of bill shock at the end of the month.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:05:10] There’s a lot to unpack there, Brian. A lot of factors that we’re going to dive a little deeper on some of them. And just hearing you talk about especially, you know, with deepfake and much more serious circumstances that we are going to have to protect ourselves against. Right. But I think of especially, I think, in the holiday shopping season now, which I think Black Friday seems like it started almost after summer ended, and I was on a website where I thought I was talking with someone who seemed like a human based on the information they were presenting to me, and then said they were transferring me to an agent. So I don’t consider myself the most knowledgeable when it comes to technology or I.T. and kind of being on alert. But at the same time, as you said, it is, it’s amazing. And it’s also a little unsettling because we can replicate so many things that people can be tricked. So let’s jump in here to your knowledge, because you have, you know, the author of the book Tech Trends 2025, all your research there, you’ve highlighted critical areas such as AI, sovereignty, quantum advantage and deep fake defense as we just kind of touched on. Can you discuss how these emerging technologies are set to impact IT operations and infrastructure management, and what steps organizations should take now to prepare for those shifts?

Brian Jackson: [00:06:30] Yeah, well, there’s a lot of different things that we have to look at. Let’s dive into the exponential AI trend, because I think this is one where businesses are really thinking about. Now, how am I getting the value out of my AI investment and what we saw with our data, Michel, is that most organizations have now started investing in AI. In fact, it’s, uh. So much so. And this is new. Over the past couple of years, if you went back five years ago, wasn’t that common for organizations to say they were investing in AI? But now most organizations are doing so, and it’s at the pace that we expect that AI’s going to exit the emerging technology category and become one of those transformative technologies, alongside cloud computing, alongside cybersecurity. So when you think about that, you think about the role that it has to play with the deployment of AI. Right? And we we can no longer sit back and be order takers in it where the business comes to us and, and says, hey, this is the AI solution that we need deployed. Please go put it in place. Don’t go and procure it and install it for us. That’s not going to cut it, at least if you’re interested in having a strategic role. If you want to be at the decision making table alongside the other The other executives. You have to be more proactive, and you have to understand how AI capabilities can make a difference in your business.

Brian Jackson: [00:08:02] You know, the strategic leaders that I talk to that have more advanced maturity and have more of that decision making role, a seat at the table with the other decision makers. They take this proactive approach. You’re not just saying, let us know what I you need to deploy for your business use cases. They’re actually hosting workshops and they’re inviting their colleagues out to demonstrate to them, look at what we can do with AI. Let’s demonstrate its capabilities for you, and we’ll show you some ideas about how you could harness this. And it might not be necessarily the right answer right away, but once you capture that imagination and get people excited about the potential, and you get people that are closer to the business problems on the front lines, thinking about how they want to want to deploy those AI capabilities. You’re starting that conversation and you’re working together to move towards extracting the value out of it. So that’s the change that I’m seeing is that those IT leaders that are able to be proactive are able to engage their business stakeholders and sort of lead them in terms of demonstrating the capabilities of the technology and where it could be potentially useful in the business strategy. They’re the ones that are getting further ahead, and they’re the ones that will be able to drive exponential value out of these AI investments.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:09:28] How do you see trends influencing IT operations and strategic planning for organizations?

Brian Jackson: [00:09:34] Yeah. So first off, with these AI capabilities, when you’re looking at operations, there’s a lot of chances to become more efficient, right. We can automate a lot of processes. And in fact our data is showing us that it is one of the areas where CIOs see the most opportunity for AI to. Make a difference and and to increase efficiency. And I think when we look at the AI or the IT service desk, right. We can maybe. Think about are there maybe some ways to deploy a chatbot not only to intake. Our tickets. Right. And let and understand what what problems we need to identify. But to actually go and solve those problems and drive a solution with some. Sort of AI agent. And then we see, um, network monitoring tools. Right. That can. Identify network problems, explain those in plain language to IT support workers. We see, um, cybersecurity tools that are more advanced and can monitor the environment. For any changes in behavior outside of the norm, you know, not just waiting to. Waiting to detect malware when it hits that network. But to flag any unusual activity that could potentially be malware that we’re not even aware of yet. So it’s getting ahead of those zero day threats. So across every IT function, there is opportunity to drive efficiency with AI. From a strategic point of view, you have to be thinking of how can we automate all of the, uh, sort of, um, day to day maintenance related tasks that we have in it. Where can we actually get rid of all that, uh, keep the lights on operations and just hand that over to automated systems so we can get the people freed up to focus on solving business problems so we can get it workers, uh, available to talk to their stakeholders and make those strategic plans about where are we going to apply AI next? And not only how are we going to drive efficiency with it. But how are we going to actually unlock new lines of business? How are we going to chase new revenue opportunities with with AI?

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:11:57] You talked about earlier pretty much everyone using AI before. It was a couple of years ago. Some people were dabbling, but now every business really should be using AI to some extent because you’re missing out if you’re not, if you’re using it the right way. That is though.

Brian Jackson: [00:12:10] Yeah, I think it’s table stakes.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:12:12] Yeah. What industries would you say that you think will be most affected by these upcoming tech trends in 2025?

Brian Jackson: [00:12:21] It depends what industry we’re looking at specifically right. Let’s look at let’s dive into the Pre-quantum foundations theme a little bit here. Because when it comes to AI, I do think there’s opportunities there for every industry. Um, so, you know, it’s just a matter of finding the right use cases, uh, depending what your industry is and what your context as an organization is. But with pre-quantum foundations, there’s some pretty clear industries that are going to be those first to gain advantage from it. Because what we’re seeing with quantum computing is it’s entering into that early stage where it’s just sort of exiting the halls of academia and into the commercial sector in terms of interest in startups, pre-seed startups forming around using quantum computing to solve new problems. So where I see the opportunity is in solving incredibly complicated math problems that classical computers just aren’t good at today, right? I’m talking about problems that relate to optimization, that relate to simulation of different systems. You look at being able to simulate something as small and detailed as a single molecule in some, and simulate a system that’s as large, as complicated as global weather patterns. Right. So we’re looking at any industry that deals with chemistry, right? We can now understand and simulate better molecular interactions. So you think about, um, you know, those industries like pharmaceuticals that want to pursue new drug discovery and understand, um, what are the clinical trials that we should be looking at launching, uh, based on quantum algorithms that are predicting, uh, drug interactions with humans and how that will affect the body, right.

Brian Jackson: [00:14:17] Um, you look at, uh, the aerospace industry, right. And heavy manufacturing sort of sectors. One aerospace company is doing, um, with quantum computing is they’re trying to understand better corrosion. And what are the factors that lead to, uh, rust forming on airplanes? This is, you know, we talk about corrosion and everybody gets sort of annoyed when their car rusts out. And, uh, that’s, that’s a That’s a problem for the everyday person. But when you think about it on the industrial level, and then when you’re an aerospace vendor or a provider that’s operating a huge fleet of airplanes and selling them into the market, you’re looking at rust as $1 billion, multi-billion dollar industry problem. Okay. So any coatings that we can apply to avoid rust situations, that’s going to help. That’s going to make a huge difference in the industry. So you can see it’s these more advanced industries that have highly technical problems they need to solve. They’re going to benefit from this quantum computing advantage first. But then on the other side, right. When we talk about the risk that quantum computing poses to everybody, it’s important to recognize there that every one that uses computer systems today that uses encryption, that’s you, that’s me, that’s everybody that protects data. That’s everybody that does financial transactions online and at stores too. Well, you have to migrate your encryption. We have to get ready for post-quantum cryptography. That’s an everybody problem.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:15:56] Yeah. And you know you’re talking about rust. It’s annoying for us when we have it on our cars. But you know if we’re if we’re flying in one of those said planes where rust is an issue, that I think it’s a worry and an annoyance for all of us. Right. So it all trickles down.

Brian Jackson: [00:16:09] Imagine how you would feel if you looked out and saw rust on that wing.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:16:13] Yeah, no.

Brian Jackson: [00:16:13] I don’t nervous.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:16:14] I don’t think I would be on that plane. So let me ask you this. What specific technologies do you believe will have the biggest impact on how companies approach digital transformation in the coming years?

Brian Jackson: [00:16:26] Yeah, I think that the conversation around digital transformation has evolved now, and we’re really talking about AI transformation as that next chapter in the digital transformation story. Um, you know what what theme I’ve noticed from this from this past year is a lot of companies saying, you know, is this a trend? Just a lot of hype. Are the vendors actually pushing this? And it won’t make that much of a difference for my business. And they’re looking at all these chatbots. Do I really need a chatbot on my spreadsheet on my network monitoring tool? It seems like a lot, and I grant that it does. Right? And certainly there is hype from the vendors, but we have seen the use cases as well. And for the companies that are successful, it’s the ones that have more IT maturity. They’ve been further along with their digital transformation efforts. They’ve been through a couple of phases of it. They’ve migrated their legacy systems to cloud based systems that are more adaptable and more centralized. They’ve eliminated data silos, and they’ve got their data into a centralized system like a data lake. And they’re able to draw on those insights. They’re able to be more flexible and adaptable and Adaptable and draw on the benefits of that technology and drive into AI. Right. And if you’re still stuck in. Well, I need to modernize. I’m still on my mainframe based systems. I’m still looking at different data silos across the different functions of my company.

Brian Jackson: [00:17:57] And then you’ll be looking at still modernizing those systems. And, you know, maybe you’ll be a little bit behind in the value that AI can really drive. But even then, you’re still opportunities to gain advantage from AI features that are in the software systems that we all harness and deploy. So I do see the opportunities for companies across the IT maturity spectrum. That’s the good news. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of companies will fail in their first efforts. You know, we’ve all heard those stories about digital transformation projects going bad most of the time, right. It doesn’t always work out for everybody. Um, you know, there’s a stat out there that 1 in 3 digital transformation projects are successful. I wouldn’t be surprised that if by next year we’re talking about the same sort of rate of success with AI, because we’re all trying to find the right proof of concept. We’re in that innovation phase for most organizations, and there will be some failures along the way, and that should be viewed as a natural part of the exploration and just part of the pain of sort of realizing the gain in the end. And I do think that those that do realize that gain will have a huge advantage, and they will continue to see that growing separation between the mature IT companies that get ahead with AI, and those that are still struggling to catch up and modernize their infrastructure.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:19:30] Let’s dive a little deeper with those pain points, because there definitely will be some. What challenges do you foresee organizations facing as they adapt to these emerging trends.

Brian Jackson: [00:19:42] There will be many challenges. And one of the main areas that I always look at challenges in an organization is in that innovation process, right? Because when I’m looking at emerging technology, it’s all fine and well for me to say, look, here are the emerging technologies that are out there on the market. They have these capabilities and that could potentially make a difference for organizations that have certain challenges, right. Which is basically what we’re doing with the Tech Trends report. But if your organization doesn’t have the right process to explore a new technology, to test it out, the right sandbox created so that you can safely interact with emerging technology and control the risk from hurting the rest of your operations. And you don’t have the right culture of curiosity or the right culture to be experimental, then you’re just not going to pick up this emerging technology and put it to work right away. Right. So that’s why, you know, when I go back to these IT leaders that I was talking to, those proactive people that were going out there and workshopping new technologies with the business, they’re creating that safe space where they say, hey, let’s experiment with technology. We don’t necessarily have to find the business use case or where it improves your day to day job right away, but let’s just sort of put it into that blue sky space and start this culture of experimentation where we can see the capabilities of the technology.

Brian Jackson: [00:21:14] And once we get our minds wrapped around that, then we can identify that first use case, that first proof of concept that we’ll pursue. And what I noticed is that after you’ve done that and you’ve got a big win with a proof of concept and you say, look, we deployed AI here and it was a big win. It’s helping customers figure out what product they need to buy, or it’s helping our citizens understand the tax code better or understand the permitting process better for our local government. Um, once you’ve done that, then everybody else wants to get involved and they say we want the next I use case. Once we’ve seen this win, we want to be the fast followers and get that advantage for our area of business problems. So that’s the exciting thing, is that a lot of organizations are going to get through that first proof of concept and start pursuing use cases and deployment across the company.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:22:12] And a key thing that we’re talking about here, and the reason for this podcast, really talking about these trends, is because preparation is so key. Knowing what’s about to happen and being as prepared as you can for what’s about to happen. So can you share any examples of companies that are already preparing for or embracing these tech shifts?

Brian Jackson: [00:22:33] Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of great examples that I that I can draw on from the Tech Trends 2025 report here. Let’s start with the we’ll go to the AI example again right. So when it comes to the expert AI models that I was talking about, I think this is going to be so important for companies as we enter into this phase where everybody’s talking about agentic AI. Right. And where do I create that AI advantage? So a lot of people might start with like, oh, well, I’ll give all my employees Microsoft Copilot, right, or we’ll get ChatGPT enterprise. That’s great. Like that will help. But I think that’s actually just the table stakes for productivity, right? It’s like, yeah, we all use the internet. We all use Microsoft Office. We have these tools available to us to be productive. So everybody has that right. If you want to get ahead you need AI that’s expert trained AI that’s fed industry specific and An organizational specific data. So a couple examples of companies that have already navigated that challenge. Moderna. Right. We know Moderna for the pharmaceutical company that produced the vaccine during the Covid pandemic. One of them that was the Spikevax vaccine that we’re aware of now, um, that was the first product that Moderna brought to market. And now that it’s done that and it’s sort of this post pandemic time, they want to innovate.

Brian Jackson: [00:24:05] They want to create new products and bring them to market. And they have a goal to bring 15 products to market over the next five years, which is pretty ambitious. And they’re going to pursue that in part with the deployment of ChatGPT enterprise. Right now, it’s not just access to the chat bot, but they’re encouraging their employees to do is go and customize the chatbot and create, um, a little chatbot agents that are good at different processes. So a couple of examples of what they’ve created already. And by the way, they created more than 750 of these chatbots in the first few months of using it. So lots of different use cases were uncovered. But one of them was called Dosadi, and it was able to help clinical researchers try and figure out what’s the right amount of the drug to put into a dose that I would use in the clinical trial. Right. And the researcher is able to review the data, visualize it, understand the reasoning of the decision, and be the human in the loop when they’re actually going to design that clinical trial. And another chatbot that they designed was to help the legal department understand, understand the contracts and, and understand, um, all the ways that, you know, the different clauses might be affect, might be affected by changes. So there’s examples in the AI industry.

Brian Jackson: [00:25:30] Another one that is worth mentioning too. Is Mars right? Just to show that in a completely different industry. Um, this is this sort of same trend of organizational data, and expert oriented data can make a difference in training the AI. So we’re going from pharmaceuticals here to consumer packaged goods, right. And Mars, they’ve created their own generative AI platform called Brahma. Right. So they thought that this would be a strategic capability for them. And what they’ve managed to do there so far, a couple of wins that they’ve shared is that they’ve been able to shorten that product innovation cycle. So we know Mars, they’ve got the Mars Bar, right? They’ve got M&Ms. Those are great candies that we all enjoy, but we want something new every now and then. And they’re getting those ideas to market by, uh, shortening the cycle that it requires. That’s required between the new idea forming and getting feedback from consumers. So it used to take months, and now they can do it in days. And then it improved their marketing lift too. And they’ve been able to get 70% sales lift by optimizing their marketing campaigns and personalizing the content that they send to their customers using AI. So you can see some amazing examples of training AI on your organization specific data. That’s where you actually get the competitive advantage.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:26:58] Yeah. You mentioned before 1 in 3 companies seeing success with digital transformation. So how should IT leaders start planning today to position their teams for success with whatever technology they’re using as these trends unfold?

Brian Jackson: [00:27:18] Well, they should be positioning their teams as collaborators with the business. Right. And, you know, not necessarily the order takers that are waiting around, waiting for the business to tell them this is how we want to want to use AI. All right. So what they should be planning for is to position their teams alongside the business. Right. Don’t have it totally separate from the business focused on their own problems. Get that cross-functional collaboration going as much as possible. So you can do that with day to day activities, right? When you’re interacting around the business problems that you’re facing or just doing your your daily tasks. And you can do it by planning specific events. You know, I’ve been talking to Canadian Tire, a retailer here up in Canada, about how they are deploying AI and about how they create that culture of excitement around wanting to adopt AI. And what one thing that they did recently was they hosted a hackathon. So this is a great tool that a lot of companies use to try and spur that excitement to try and get different teams working together. And what you see is that it’s open to the whole company, right? And, uh, they’ll form teams, you know, that include people from it and include people from different business lines that have ideas about ways that they want to apply AI to solve new business problems. And then you come together and you might have an entire day, or maybe even an entire weekend where you do a lot of work.

Brian Jackson: [00:28:53] You set aside, you know, your day to day operations, and you focus in on this innovation activity. You focus on on creating a proof of concept, that pilot solution that’s going to be the prototype for what you want to design. And you put it in front of judges. And the judges could be executives from the different lines of business. It could include, uh, different business analysts, maybe even bring in an outside consultant to help with this. And the judges will determine what solution is the best, which solution has the most work that’s being done on it and is more advanced, and then they can provide resources, right? Sometimes there’s cash prizes involved, other ways to incent, uh, and reward the winners. And even if the teams don’t win that contest necessarily, it doesn’t mean that their idea won’t be adopted and it won’t be useful further down the line. So this is a great way to spur some innovation and get some new prototypes involved. And if you can get it positioned as a leader of these types of activities and a host, and then sort of seed IT professionals throughout the organization by putting them with the different teams and the different business leaders that are bringing ideas to a hackathon. And that’s a great place to be. And you’ll be seeing, you’ll be seeing not as an order taker, but as an active partner that’s strategically involved.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:30:23] Any common misconceptions about the future of it that you’d like to like to address.

Brian Jackson: [00:30:28] You know, there’s still a lot of misconceptions around what AI is good for and what AI is not good for. So you say misconceptions about the future of it. Right. So I’ll use this as a way to look at emerging technologies and understand how most people expect they might impact it, or expect how they’ll be like the it that we’ve experienced in the past. And that’s just not the case. There’s a lot of differences. So you notice people get hung up on generative AI being imperfect, right? It’s not perfect. There’s a lot of problems when you apply it to the wrong type of challenges. For example, we you know, there was a conversation about, hey, you know, ChatGPT, it doesn’t know how many hours are in strawberry. It can’t count them properly. How can we trust it to do other types of tasks? Really, it could just be making things up, which can be. But when but when you think about it, there’s a difference between a deterministic problem where there’s one right answer all the time, and a problem that could have many right answers that aren’t necessarily one right answer, or one like a math problem, right? That has one right answer. There are sometimes there are challenges where there’s many right answers and ChatGPT in those situations.

Brian Jackson: [00:31:47] That gives you a probabilistic response and output. That’s where it’s most useful. And there should always be a human in the loop. I think most of the time when you’re looking at at using that output and how it gets used in a solution, that that’s important too. And then in quantum, you know, I think a lot of people just see quantum computing as that next step where we’re going to further Moore’s Law, get faster performance, get a faster chip. Right. And it’s just about the compute power. It’s not that quantum computing is totally, fundamentally different way of solving problems, and in our lifetimes, we’ll never see quantum computers. Replace everything that we do with classical systems today. We’ll continue to use these classical systems, these computers that. We’re using right now to do this podcast that will be with us for. Many years to come. Right. What quantum computers will be good at are solving specifically complex problems that classical computers can’t solve. And that’s where we talk about hybrid computing and the need to integrate these systems and diversify the types of infrastructure, the types of hardware that we can bring to bear when it comes to solving IT problems. So just a couple of misconceptions as examples there.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:33:09] Brian, how do you see the role of emerging tech in driving innovation versus maintaining operational stability?

Brian Jackson: [00:33:17] Well it’s both right. And this is something that I looked at with AI as well, is that there are many advantages. There’s many opportunities to just drive more efficiency with business process. And in our last year’s tech report, we had a trend called autonomous AI operations. Right. So we can look at it like we talked about and think about how will I help me save on my maintenance tasks? How will it help me do my maintenance sooner before I actually experience downtime? Right. And it’ll be good at all that it will find many ways to optimize processes throughout the organization. And a lot of companies will be happy to be in that space with AI and get the incremental value from it. But when you think about the exponential value, it’s actually going to be from those companies that totally reevaluate the way they do business and the way their business models work with AI and put it at the center of everything they do. You write, you think about the companies that are the most valuable companies in the world right now. Google. Apple. Amazon. Right. These are companies that 20 years ago, they didn’t say, let’s take technology, the new emerging technology like that’s available with the internet and make finance a little bit better, make banking a little bit better, make, um, retail a little bit better. No. They said there’s a totally new way to do business, and we’re going to create new business models. And that will be the secret to our success and exponential growth. And they were right. And the companies that are able to identify the ways to re-engineer that business model and offer put AI at the center of their value creation, are going to be the ones that become the next big winners over the next decade.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:35:16] What advice would you give to organizations on selecting not only the right the right technologies, but the right partners to navigate the changes ahead.

Brian Jackson: [00:35:26] Yeah, this is a really tough topic and a challenging area to navigate. And Info-tech research group has a whole methodology that we will follow through with our clients to help them procure the right solutions, select the right application or even to identify what emerging technology is right for them. But what I’d encourage you to do is try a bit of foresight exercises, right? Think about not only what is the internal context of our organization and our goals, based on the needs identified by our strategic leaders, by our own workers. But look outside and look at what’s happening not only in your industry, but in other industries too, and say, um, how might the world change in the future? Consider even some uncertain futures that you might not be sure are going to play out right, and think about if certain factors change, how would that world look different? And if in that world, how would we have to operate differently? What sort of capabilities would we need to continue to succeed with our business model, or would we need to actually reinvent ourselves and create a new business model to stay afloat, to stay ahead? So it can be a challenging process because it requires you to get out of your comfort zone and reimagine what the world is going to be like, and that it can be tough to accept that the world is not always going to be like in the future, what it’s been like in the past. But I think that we are entering into this era of a lot of transformation and a lot of uncertainty ahead. So foresight becomes more critical.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:37:16] Any final thoughts as we’re wrapping up here?

Brian Jackson: [00:37:18] Just to look at Look at the emerging technology trends, reports, the sort of things that I’m releasing and other analysts put out there. You know, it’s not like Infotech is the only one putting out tech trends for 2025. Certainly there’s a lot of people in this conversation. And don’t dismiss it as something that is for other organizations that are more advanced than you to learn from and experiment with. Ai is so accessible that it’s truly a democratized technology, and even if you can’t reap the most potential value out of it, there’s a lot to be gained from exploring technologies like this and thinking about ways to get it into the hands of your employees. So even if you feel like you’re not that far ahead, or you maybe even feel like you’re behind other IT departments and other organizations, um, there’s something to be gained here, and there’s something that you can do to put yourself in a position to get the value from these emerging technologies.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:38:18] And that is going to do it for this episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to it. Brought to you by Device42 two. A big thank you to Brian Jackson, Principal Research Director at Infotech and of course, author of Tech Trends 2025. We covered a lot of territory here, Brian, I sovereignty, Quantum advantage, deepfake defense, and of course, how they will shape the future of it. So thank you for being here. Appreciate your time.

Brian Jackson: [00:38:41] Thanks for having me, Michel.

Michelle Dawn Mooney: [00:38:43] And I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you would like to hear more conversations about the latest IT innovations and challenges, don’t forget to subscribe for more information on how Device42 can help you gain comprehensive visibility into your IT infrastructure and optimize your operations, you can visit their website. I’m your host, Michelle. Thanks again for joining us. We hope to connect with you on another podcast soon.