AI, driverless cars and 6G: What to look out for from the tech world in 2025
By Lucy Fitzsimons, ITV News Producer
Artificial intelligence (AI), driverless cars and 6G are some of the major technological advancements we could see in 2025.
This year saw the explosion of AI and its increasing use in everyday life, with platforms like ChatGPT becoming more and more popular.
So what tech developments could we see emerge over the next 12 months?
AI advancements
Year on year, AI is becoming more important and integrated in our everyday lives - and 2025 will be no different.
This year, ChatGPT - a generative AI chatbot - grew massively in popularity, with its founder, Sam Altman, revealing the platform has more than 300 million weekly users.
In December, WhatsApp announced its users can now directly message ChatGPT to get answers to questions or creative help for projects. The chatbot also has its own dedicated contact number on the messaging platform.
Apple previously announced it had integrated the chatbot with Siri in its most recent update.
It's likely more platforms will integrate ChatGPT in the new year, when we can also expect to see the growth of agentic AI - a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from experiences and perform tasks autonomously.
Technology research and consultancy firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI - up from 0% in 2024.
Consultancy firm BDO predicts healthcare providers will use AI to improve care delivery, and retailers will expand their use of the technology to deliver personalised recommendations to customers and drive the development of mannequins.
Self driving cars
Meanwhile, the idea of self driving cars hitting our roads is edging closer to reality.
We're likely to see more developments in autonomous cars in 2025, with the biggest advancements likely to be in robotaxi services and commercial vehicles, like autonomous trucks.
While fully autonomous vehicles may be a few more years away, semi-autonomous features are likely to be more common next year.
Tesla is just one of the companies working on self driving cars in the UK, having previously announced hopes to introduce autonomous vehicles on roads in the European Union (EU) by 2025.
The previous Conservative government hoped to have self-driving cars on roads by 2026, after passing the Automated Vehicles act in May.
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Growth of 5G services and research into 6G
5G is expected to be rolled out at a faster rate across the country in 2025, particularly after the recent merger of Vodafone and Three.
Research into 6G is also underway and countries are likely to begin preparations for its implementation.
However, experts have previously warned the commercial implementation of 6G could be at least a decade away.
Brain-machine interfaces
At the start of 2024, Elon Musk's company, Neuralink, said they had successfully implanted a computer chip into a human's brain.
The device had been designed to interpret a person's brain activity, so they can operate a computer or smartphone by simply intending to move without actually needing to be able to.
Neurological enhancement can improve human cognitive abilities by using technologies that read and decode brain activity, according to Gartner.
A person's brain is read by "using unidirectional brain-machine interfaces or bidirectional brain-machine interfaces (BBMIs)", the organisation said.
According to Gartner, this has potential to develop areas in human upskilling as well as marketing and performance.
By 2030, it predicts that 30% of knowledge workers will be enhanced by, and dependent on, technologies such as BBMIs, in order to stay relevant with the rise of AI in the workplace - up from less than 1% in 2024.
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Wearable technology
Samsung is developing Augmented Reality (AR) glasses which are expected to launch next year.
Similar to the Apple Vision Pro, the glasses are expected to revolutionise how people interact with digital content by blending it with the users physical space.
Quantum computing
In December, Google said it had overcome a key challenge in quantum computing with a new generation of chip, called Willow.
The firm said said this chip solved a computing problem that would otherwise take a classical computer more time than the history of the universe, in five minutes.
In 2025, we may see more developments in this, as Microsoft, IBM and Google chase quantum computing due to its promises of computing speeds far faster than today’s fastest systems.
Google hopes quantum computers will one day solve problems in medicine, battery chemistry and AI which are currently out of reach for today's computers.
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