The Top 11 Technology Trends of 2025

The rise of AI companions

Role AI, a site where people can befriend an AI chatbot, is often used for romance, but there’s a growing opportunity to build a massive business with a fascinating monetization loophole: AI companions for the elderly.

Recently, a number of companies have experimented with giving robotic pets to nursing home residents, part of a growing wave of healthcare technology trends focused on supporting aging populations. Remarkably, one business called Paro even got the FDA to classify their companion robots as a medical device.

This significant milestone allows the product to be eligible for insurance coverage and shifting the spend from the consumer to the insurance company means a whole lot more revenue potential and less price sensitivity.

Caretaking robots and AI companions have several significant advantages over humans. Unlike their human counterparts, they’re unlikely to ever become frustrated or impatient or forget doctors' appointments or reminders to take medication. And they won’t defraud or abuse their patients, a surprisingly common problem in the industry.

As AI becomes more capable, we can expect to see new players enter this untapped market of helping elders cope with the loneliness epidemic, one of the most significant mental health trends.

Low code / no-code platforms surge in popularity

The low-code/no-code movement has exploded into one of the most impactful new technology trends, empowering non-technical users to develop applications themselves using user-friendly interfaces and pre-built templates. These advances shorten businesses' time to market and reduces the need to rely on scarce programming talent.

Generative AI use skyrockets following ChatGPT’s launch

Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2023, millions of businesses have integrated generative AI into their customer-facing products and internal processes, making it the dominant latest technology trend reshaping industries at scale. Consumers, too, are using AI for everything from therapy to medical advice to help with schoolwork and everything in between, sparking a vast array of rapidly-evolving AI trends.

Tournament-style job boards to match skilled candidates with employers

Information security professionals have learned that some people just love breaking into secured systems, and they’ll be better-off gamifying that than fighting it. HackTheBox is a virtual penetration-testing tournament: users are challenged to break into simulated systems as quickly as possible. When the site launched, it “required” an invite code—but savvy users were expected to hack their way around this limitation.

Sites like this increasingly became popular after Youtube started banning content showcasing how to bypass websites’ security measures and new entrants into the space looked for other ways to learn.

The pace of change in software makes it hard to hire purely based on credentials. Schools can still filter for raw ability, and can give students a thorough grounding in theory, but practice evolves faster than curricula. That’s especially true in security, where there’s an arms-race between hackers and IT teams—security holes get patched, new exploits get discovered, and software updates constantly introduce complex new vulnerabilities. A tournament-style approach with a constant variety of new challenges is the best way to identify people with the combination of skills and adaptability necessary to thrive—hinting at future technology trends in hiring and training.

The site has a job board, with different jobs locked based on user rankings. One source of word-of-mouth advertising: security professionals suggest tournaments like HackTheBox as practice for people who have just joined the industry or are interviewing for a new role.

This approach even works in other fields: every designer has a portfolio page, stock-pickers tout their ideas on SumZero and ValueInvestorsClub, and media companies spot talent in indie newsletters and blogs. The closer a job is to a fun hobby, the more likely it is that a tournament-based job board will work.