Forrester Technology & Innovation Summit preview: Preparing for emerging tech

Forrester’s top 10 emerging technologies for 2025 report has positioned generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as a technology that IT leaders need to consider over the next year or so.

According to Forrester, short-term technologies balance AI acceleration with security needs. “GenAI for language and visual content, TuringBots and IoT security remain on our top 10 list from 2024,” the analyst firm noted.

But the 2025 report also sees agentic AI and synthetic data making it into the top 10 emerging technologies that Forrester believes will offer measurable return on investment (ROI) in the next two years.

“Leverage top emerging technologies to drive innovation” is one of the sessions at next month’s Forrester Technology & Innovation summit in London, where Forrester vice-president and research director Oliwia Berdak will be hosting a panel discussion with other Forrester analysts looking at the trends.

Discussing how IT leaders should assess emerging technologies, she said: “With some technologies, it’s the ecosystem that really matters. The technology itself might be ready, but if the real world stops it from being adopted, then that’s when we have problems.

“If the blocker is really around the regulatory framework, or the fact that it’s a big industry issue, then probably the best option is to work with industry associations and try to build some of the underlying infrastructure that needs to be there.”

Emerging technologies that Forrester believes will deliver a return on investment in the next two years include GenAI for language, security around the internet of things (IoT) to combat cyber threats to connected devices, synthetic data, and TuringBots that streamline software development.

Medium-term technologies identified by Forrester include agentic AI, edge intelligence and autonomous vehicles. Such technologies, according to Forrester’s analysis, are stalling in the face of real-world complexity, which means there is a growing divide between AI’s theoretical capabilities and real-world deployment.

Berdak suggested that IT leaders consider “implementing some early proofs of concept to understand how they use these technologies in their organisation and industry”.

Looking at agentic AI, the analyst firm noted that business benefits are largely incremental today, with the transformative benefits of agentic AI some years away. Over the next few years, Forrester predicted that organisations would start to integrate agentic AI systems incrementally into their business operations, but the wholesale replacement and transformation of processes would take time.

Quantum computing is not an emerging technology that appears in Forrester’s short- to medium-term ROI outlook, but it does expect that mature quantum security benefits will be available to most in a few years.

Even though the real threats that quantum computers pose to decryption are still a decade out, Forrester noted that there is a small possibility that breakthroughs, including Microsoft’s recent announcement of the Majorana 1 chip, will accelerate that timeline. It urged organisations that have a zero-risk tolerance to having their data harvested and decrypted should start to invest in quantum security.

Humanoid robots entered Forrester’s list as a technology with a longer-term outlook, where the return on investment is beyond five years. When asked about how IT leaders should plan for such technological developments, Berdak said: “It depends a little bit on the type of leader you are and your innovation or R&D [research and development] budget.”

She said many organisations do not have the ambition to be first to market. “They want to be fast followers, so they will never spend money on technologies that, at this point, we think may be five or 10 years away.”

But for Berdak, what the emergence and adoption of GenAI has demonstrated is that expertise takes time to build. “If you can position yourself as a leader, as someone who’s actually gained expertise in that technology, then when the technology is ready, you’re in a really good position to accelerate some of these efforts, as opposed to someone who’s never done anything with the technology.”