While agentic AI might excite CIOs as the next iteration of AI within business workflows, it will pose challenges for businesses, Forrester Research analysts say.
From changes in cloud computing investment to challenges with the next stage of artificial intelligence, technology strategies for CIOs will shift in 2025.
Forrester Research analyst Jeff Pollard said Forrester's 2025 technology predictions will demonstrate what businesses should prepare for in the coming year. Pollard spoke during the Forrester Technology and Innovation Summit in Austin, Texas. Analysts assessed multiple technology scenarios identifying four possible outcomes next year, he said.
"Every prediction we make is something that we expect to happen within the next 12 months," Pollard said.
4 technology predictions for 2025
1. Challenges with agentic AI
One of the top themes at the Forrester summit centered on the rise of agentic AI, or multiple AI agents that act autonomously on business goals and actions within workflows.
CIOs and other business leaders will be excited to build agentic AI architectures within business workflows, Forrester analyst Rowan Curran said. However, an estimated 75% of businesses attempting to build out their own agentic AI will fail, he said.
The idea of multi-agent architectures and multi-ecosystem agent architectures -- where an AWS agent talks to a Microsoft agent and then to a Salesforce agent, for example -- "is not what we see as being a feasible thing in the short term," Curran said, due to the current lack of testing and validating capabilities for such architectures across the enterprise.
2. Increases in private cloud investments
Business leaders will increasingly spend on private cloud to address regulatory compliance issues, Forrester analyst Tracy Woo said. Four out of five cloud leaders will increase their investment in private cloud by 20%, she noted.
Woo said more countries, especially in the European Union, are introducing digital sovereignty measures, which protect an individual state or country's ability to control data. To meet those compliance requirements, business leaders will start turning to private cloud and keeping their data localized.
"We will start to see an increase in the amount of workload placement on premises," she said.
3. CISOs will move away from generative AI
Despite excitement about generative AI tools, CISOs will deprioritize use of the technology by 10% in 2025, Forrester analyst Allie Mellen said.
They need the really critical problems solved, and we're just not doing that with generative AI right now.
Allie MellenAnalyst, Forrester Research
Generative AI has not lived up to vendor promises that it can automate security tasks, Mellen said. She said it takes more time for security teams to use generative AI than not, noting that it takes around 40 hours of training for security teams to start using generative AI tools. Additionally, as CISOs face budget constraints, it will make it difficult for them to invest in a technology without concrete examples of the technology's effectiveness in security.
Generative AI isn't fixing the security problems that matter, Mellen said.
"They need the really critical problems solved, and we're just not doing that with generative AI right now," she said.
4. Technology risk heightens
Roughly 60% of organizations will identify technology risk as their most important strategic enterprise risk, Forrester analyst Christopher Gilchrist said.
Technology is changing the landscape of how businesses create value and enhance business models, becoming a more strategic risk factor for organizations, he said. Technology will be part of the equation for any future business considerations, and if the internal risks it poses are not taken into account, it will affect an organization's ability to push through other, external risks, Gilchrist said.
"Not since the financial crisis have we seen a concentration, and growth, of a single risk factor more than this technology risk," he said.
Makenzie Holland is a senior news writer covering big tech and federal regulation. Prior to joining TechTarget Editorial, she was a general assignment reporter for the Wilmington StarNews and a crime and education reporter at the Wabash Plain Dealer.
