Tech that will change your life in 2025

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Every December for the past decade, we’ve put on our futuristic glasses to predict the year ahead in tech. Looking back, we’ve gotten a lot right—and, OK, a few things wrong.

Come on, who didn’t think Harry Potter’s AR adventure would be a smash hit? But trust us: This year our predictions are more on point than ever. In 2025, big loose ends will be tied up, including TikTok’s legal troubles and electric vehicles’ federal subsidies. Long-awaited promises will be fulfilled, like self-driving Ubers, cleaner-energy data centers and crypto for everyday investors.

And, of course, AI: AI agents, AI scams, AI weather forecasters, AI…everything. As for us humans, if our longevity-tech predictions pan out, we’ll be making these annual forecasts for another 80 years. Every big (and small) tech company will hype up the promise of AI “agents" this year.

So far, generative AI has mostly been about creating text, images and videos. But in the next evolution, AI systems don’t just create—they do. Agents will understand context, learn your preferences and interact with you and other software to get stuff done: booking travel, ordering food, shopping for those new sneakers, etc.

“Our devices are making us work way too hard to get things done," said David Singleton, co-founder and chief executive of /dev/agents, a company building an agent operating system. Singleton said his platform, launching in 2025, aims to remove the friction from tasks we repeat 10 to 20 times a day. Google already declared its new Gemini 2.0 the “model for the agentic era"—yes, they said “agentic"— and has shown how its AI agents can buy plane tickets and other stuff.