AI chips, computer vision, digital twins and explainable AI among additional emerging technologies to watch in 2025.
Forrester expands its analysis of 2025’s most promising innovations with a new report, Ten More Top Emerging Technologies In 2025, spotlighting additional advancements poised to drive measurable business impact.
Building on its earlier forecast of the year’s key technologies, this latest research highlights solutions that enterprises can leverage in the next two years to enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, and unlock new competitive advantages.
The report suggests four short-term technologies – AI chips, computer vision, digital twins and explainable AI – will deliver benefits quickly.
AI chips: Whether specialized for AI workloads or designed for general computing with AI-optimized capabilities, AI chips are shaping business value across high-end performance, enterprise-scale applications and edge AI operations such as agriculture and robotics. The relentless demand and rapid innovation in machine learning, generative AI, and reasoning frameworks are pushing chip manufacturers to develop solutions that balance cost, power efficiency, and scalability.
Computer vision: The ability to automate human sight with computers offers massive opportunities across every sector, including identity verification in financial services; claims processing in insurance and healthcare; and defect assessment in manufacturing. By embedding computer vision capabilities into products or services, companies can improve product safety and functionality and increase customer engagement. Computer vision also enhances decision-making by detecting trends, predicting outcomes, and refining insights.
Digital twins: Digital twins address use cases in asset-intensive industries like manufacturing, supporting everything from product design to the operation of machines in the field. In addition to improving the use of expensive machines, digital twins help enterprises understand the operation of complex assets and minimize the cost of poor design decisions. True digital twins integrate IoT sensor data with physics-based models to refine efficiency and reduce costs.
Explainable AI: For AI to achieve its full transformative potential, humans will need to trust AI outputs. Explainable AI is key to engendering that trust. Explainability builds trust in AI by allowing users to trace its decisions and observe its performance. It can also mitigate the risk of biased and discriminatory decisions and provide additional insights into companies’ operations and customers.
Forrester finds that three technologies – blockchain, personal AI devices and secure access service edge (SASE) – will take two to five years to deliver expected benefits. Meanwhile, three technologies – 6G, extended reality and quantum computing platforms present big potential benefits and substantial risks, remaining five or more years from realizing their potential.
Charlie Dai, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester provides additional perspectives:
On AI Chips
“The surging demand for AI chipsets in APAC will continue, and the key areas include high-performance computing and advanced packaging, government-backed semiconductor self-sufficiency initiatives, and AI-driven innovations in chip design and manufacturing. This fuels significant business value to the AI-native infrastructure hardware as the backbones for generative AI, agentic AI, and physical AI.”
Quantum Computing
“Key quantum computing trends in APAC for 2025 include strong national initiatives and public-private collaborations, with countries like Japan, China, South Korea and Singapore investing heavily in research, talent development and infrastructure. Focus areas are specialized hardware, quantum machine learning, fault-tolerant qubits, and hybrid quantum-classical systems. Regional collaboration and quantum startups are expanding, aiming for practical applications in finance, AI, energy and healthcare – positioning APAC as a global quantum hub.”
