[Advertorial] Cloudera’s Chris Royles shares five key technology trends for 2025.

1. Intellectual property and privacy concerns drive investments in on-premises and sovereign cloud environments

“Next year will see on-premise investment increase as companies look to protect their data and intellectual property (IP),” said Chris Royles Field, CTO EMEA. “Companies are investing heavily in data and AI and developing their own intellectual property that they want to protect.” By storing data on-premises, they have greater security and control as proprietary code and project information remains in their own environment.

“Interest in sovereign cloud solutions is also growing. Hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft have recognized that data repatriation will impact their business models, leading them to offer more local cloud options that are compliant with data protection regulations.”

2. Quantum computing will trigger the next “technical arms race”.

“Quantum computing will eclipse AI as the next major technological revolution,” Royles continues. Development is in full swing, which is why companies are investing heavily in next-generation data centers. These are equipped to handle ultra-cold temperatures, specialized infrastructure, and the enormous energy required to support quantum systems.

“The potential value of breakthroughs in quantum computing is unprecedented, ranging from accelerating drug development and genetic reprogramming in healthcare to bringing energy closer to nuclear fusion, potentially making traditional energy sources obsolete. In addition to global market leaders such as Google and Microsoft, quantum technology is also offered as a cloud service, allowing companies to access this technology without having to build their own infrastructure.

“As quantum technology emerges as a game-changer, this shift will trigger a race as companies rush to realize its potential, harness it to better leverage AI capabilities and gain a competitive advantage.”

3. AI agents will influence decision making

“At the moment, AI is not yet able to keep up with human decision-making, but next year with Agentic AI, that will change,” believes Royles.

“Agent AI will drive innovation and transform problem solving and decision making in real time. AI agents can optimize tasks with ant-like efficiency, quickly overcoming challenges and adapting in real time. To this end, event-driven architectures are being built to allow AI to respond directly to real-life events, revolutionizing industries such as telecommunications and logistics.

“Agentic AI’s ability to run complex simulations enables companies to plan, test and optimize faster than ever before, delivering actionable insights in real-time. For example, telecommunications networks are becoming smarter as AI can predict disruptions such as storms. This allows proactive measures to be taken to minimize potential service disruptions while improving the overall customer experience in unexpected ways.”

4. “Always on” AI increases data management challenges

“By 2025, we will see AI in almost everything, with AI enabled by default. Your phone automatically analyzes your email to suggest follow-ups or prioritize tasks based on your daily patterns – with locally running models to protect your privacy. Your car even predicts optimal routes based on real-time traffic and weather data.”

“With AI everywhere, the amount of new data being generated is increasing exponentially. This will increase data management challenges as companies strive to gain insights from a growing volume and variety of AI-generated data. Poor data management can lead to disillusionment as companies become overwhelmed by the constant flow of information and unable to use it effectively.

“As AI becomes standard in everyday operations, the challenge is to ensure that the insights are relevant and actionable, that they meet expectations for security and flexibility and not just add noise. To realize the full potential of AI, companies need robust data management and multi-cloud strategies to access, store and analyze data, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge, to achieve the greatest possible value. “

5. 2025 will be the year of realism for AI

“Companies will actually start using AI in 2025 or risk missing opportunities and losing business,” said Paul Mackay, regional vice president EMEA & APAC. “After the hyperbolic growth of AI over the last 18 months, 2025 will be the year of realism as customers want AI to work for them. The possible uses of AI are enormous, but implementation requires a clearly defined focus. Before rushing in, companies should determine how AI can improve products and services and whether it is safe to do so. Companies that can demonstrate their AI capabilities will rise to the top, but those that just talk risk disappointing customers.

Commentary from analyst John Santaferraro, CEO of Ferraro Consulting

Should CIOs adapt their AI strategy in 2025?

As with generative AI, CIOs must identify the applications within their organization that are best suited for an AI agent. CIOs have long been concerned with improving business processes, including through robotic process automation. Processes that are already digitized and automated can benefit the most from AI agents if humans intervene at the right time.

Will the phase of human intervention change?

The importance of human intervention in AI workflows will increase significantly by 2025. Ray Wang, chief analyst at Constellation Research, said the question now is where to incorporate AI. In the future, the question will be, “Where do we connect people?” We are approaching an era where there will be more AI agents than employees, but we will continue to need people-centered organizations as the Requirements for governance around AI continue to increase. AI agents must have goals that are consistent with the organization and the capabilities to achieve those goals or require human intervention.

AI Competence: The Golden Key in 2025

The rapid development of AI means that the gap in AI skills is widening. Every gap is an opportunity for companies, and those that invest in AI training programs now will benefit the most as employees stay abreast of the latest developments and know how to best use AI in their work.

Commentary from Valerio Romano, Senior Managing Director – Cloud First Lead, EMEA at Accenture

How will cloud strategies evolve in 2025?

We have seen cloud strategies evolve over the last few years and of course COVID has changed their usage, resulting in a significant shift in the impact of the cloud. In 2025, cloud strategies will continue to evolve as the market moves from technology transformation to leveraging cloud as an enabler, powered by Gen AI.

The market opportunity for a data strategy lies in immediate adoption, just like ChatGPT, only now we are in a different phase. Companies are scaling the use of GenAI and this is where understanding the data is crucial because without a clear understanding, scaling is impossible.

This is a commercial submission from Chris Royles of Cloudera. The publishers are not responsible for the content. Find out more about the company’s performance here.